


love is the stranger who sojourns

by tin_girl



Category: Original Work
Genre: M/M, black sails taught me that one should always make bible quotes gay, i sure didn't put 'short' in 'short story' huh, ive been writing this the whole month and sleep is for the weak, technically a halloween story but it's not a horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:29:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27083419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tin_girl/pseuds/tin_girl
Summary: “It’s almost old enough to call this excavation,” he explains with childish excitement, all hummingbird hands. “There are houses you renovate, and then there are houses you reconstruct.”Suddenly, Riley understands: In the tides’ hold, the house must look like a shipwreck, and Noah must be the kind of person who believes that the Titanics of the world ought to be pulled out of the water and turned habitable.(“If I were a house, I’d want to be built next to this one.”If you were a house, Riley thinks, you’d have the ugliest carpets.)
Relationships: Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Comments: 12
Kudos: 18





	love is the stranger who sojourns

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NoteInABottle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoteInABottle/gifts).



> For Note, because how could I not? <3 
> 
> Content warning for mentions of severe bullying, child abuse, and a brief mention of self-harm. 
> 
> Despite the depressing quotes at the beginning, and the warnings, this is (technically and eventually) supposed to be a heartwarming story.

In each room

of each lung,

silence swells

like a syndicate of ants.

A ghost unfurls

like a flower from the television. The bathroom

window broken, the wind asking questions.

Asking you to come outside,

to see what it has against you.

~Adam O. Davis, _Ghost of Motel 6_

*

You cannot let me walk inside you too long inside

the veins where my small feet touch

bottom.

You must reach inside and pull me

like a silver bullet

from your arm.

~Diane Wakoski, _Inside Out_

*

This is love…isn’t it? When you notice someone’s absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love their presence?

~Jonathan Safran Foer, _Everything Is Illuminated_

The attic ceiling leaks, there’s a rat living under the sink, and a mould stain spreads wide on the bathroom wall, but the house is not in ruin, as such. The furniture has lasted decades and will last decades more, there’s nothing dead up the chimney, and if one counts to a hundred, the shower runs hot. Riley lights candles in every room on his first day, for company, even though that’s exactly what he’s here to escape.

 _Must you go?_ His mother said once he was all packed. _It’s horribly lonely out there, you know._

It’s hard to imagine that his grandmother could have been lonely here. Riley knows that she used to talk to plants, but he also knows that while some people do so because they’re lonely, others do so because they _aren’t_. He stares at the row of ferns planted inside old, mismatched Wellingtons placed on the kitchen windowsill and regrets having come too late to save them from dying. The leaves are curled upon themselves as if the plants tried to keep water in by forming fists, and when Riley prods the earth with his finger, it’s chalk-dry, no worms.

The house is not in ruin, but it is in need of repair, and Riley is hardly the man for the job. His hands are the hands of an aristocrat: smooth like he hasn’t worked a day in his life, with wrists so thin that one could circle each with two fingers and do damage. The left one hurts every now and then, a dull pain that comes and goes regardless of the weather. Riley used to be upset about it: how he couldn’t even have the consolation of being able to magically predict storms, but by now he’s too exhausted to feel any particular way about it.

(Show me where it hurts, his mother would say when he was younger, rotating his wrist for him, and he’d shake her off because he didn’t know how to say: I don’t have a time machine.)

The house is the sort that talks: sounds like coughs coming from the pipes, the floorboards whining plaintively even when he doesn’t step on them, and a quiet buzzing that Riley isn’t sure he’s not imagining: a consistent murmur like when you press your ear to a home appliance. Riley is alone in the house, but whenever he hears something creak at low tide, he jumps, hand instinctively closing around a weapon that he does not have. 

He goes a week without electricity before caving in, and his mother, with the eerie timing of a fortune-teller, calls less than an hour after he’s reconnected the landline. She asks him where he’s sitting even though she must remember that the cord is not long enough to stretch farther than the hall.

“I am staring at the hideous painting of a boy holding a pear,” Riley reports, settled on the ground with his back to the wall and his feet propped on the opposite one. “I’m thinking that craquelure being on purpose is the stupidest thing.”

“That’s your great-aunt Thelma, you know,” his mother tells him fondly, “God rest her soul.”

“My _moustached_ aunt Thelma?” Riley says, squinting at the painting. He has Thelma’s hair: waves the colour of what his mother refers to as ‘undercooked sunset.’ The pear in his aunt’s hand glints white near the bottom, like it’s been bitten, but Riley remembers it whole from before, when he climbed a rickety chair and almost killed himself trying to brush dust off the top of the obscenely baroque frame.

“The very one,” his mother laughs. “It’s a family curse.”

“You don’t have a moustache,” Riley assures her. “I don’t, either.”

“I have hairy arms,” she points out, and it’s his turn to laugh – space cleared for the sound in the ensuing silence – but he can’t quite bring himself to do so. He’s always loved his mother’s arms, and, when small, used to tug on the hair there, just long enough to catch between two fingers, and plead, _eyelash wishes_. She’d swat at his hands and tell him that eyelashes belonged on eyes, but by the time she’d send him off to bed, he’d always have at least three hairs clasped in his hand to bargain with for a dream come true.

“I think I can hear the tap leaking,” Riley lies. He’s a masterful liar, always feeding his mother untruths and hoarding facts all to himself.

“Oh?” she says, amused. “And what will you do about it?”

Whenever something would break at their house, they’d run to get the neighbour. They’d pretend to be aeroplanes, arms stretched to the sides as they rushed across their garden and over the fence. It’s something Riley never quite grew out of – the joy of there not being anybody who knows how to fix a sink at the house.

“I’ll put a mug under the tap so the water’s not wasted,” he says, thumbing the cord that he’s accidentally wound around his neck like a noose. “I’ll water Grandma’s dead plants with it.”

“How about you plant something new?”

“Whatever for?” he says, and marvels at how when he glances at the painting, even more of the pear seems to be gone. “Anything I plant, it’ll die anyway.”

*

Riley is no good at self-indulgence: he pours himself a glass of red wine that his grandmother kept in the cellar, but he can’t quite bring himself to drink it. Aristocratic hands or not, he doesn’t like how lazy his fingers look wrapped around the crystal stem. He’d rather drink it out of a mug, or, better yet, not at all.

He ends up emptying the wineglass into one of the Wellingtons. The ferns _are_ dead, so it’s all the same.

You don’t deserve things, someone told him once, and back then, Riley wanted to nod and repeat, I don’t deserve things. It was the first thing since he’d learned that bees die after using their stings that made sense.

Someone pounds on the front door, and Riley stalks to the nearest window first. It’s dark outside, the stars like a spill of milk, and he can’t see a thing, but unless whoever’s out there swam here, it must be low tide again. The house stands on a tidal island, even if calling the small plot of land poking out of the water like a knee of some submerged giant an island is generous, and it’s what Riley loves about it most: how, every day, the water circles the property like a collar – nothing gets in, nothing gets out. ‘Pinhead island’ his mother used to call it jokingly, but it never took, maybe because Riley’s grandmother was larger than life and both greedy and territorial enough to never settle for living on the head of a pin. _I own more than you think_ , she would tell Riley, all her three chins raised proudly. _Half of it is underwater, sure, but what of it?_

Riley learned not to hope for good things years ago and years too late, and so he grabs an old frying pan before heading for the door. He’s never killed anyone, but he lives in a constant readiness to kill, always aware of the placement of heavy or sharp objects in every room. He used to keep a can opener under his pillow, after he’d learned that some people counted knives.

He swings the pan experimentally once or twice before daring to crack the door open.

“It’s inappropriate, calling on someone this late in the evening,” he says, trying to sound unpleasant without sounding too snotty. The boy – man? – outside smiles sheepishly, and Riley stares: the porchlight is doing extraordinary things to his almost ugly face.

“It’s only that it was high tide before now,” the intruder explains in a voice that brings sawdust to mind. He sounds like a workshop – someplace you could hurt yourself on something, where even wood yields. “I come bearing gifts. Well, _a_ gift. Just the one.”

He steps to the side to reveal a small pine tree planted in a metal bucket.

“I’m no good at baking, and it’s Christmas in, what? Three months?” the boy says, scratching the back of his neck. “I figured— Oh, blast, I should have _bought_ a cake.”

He looks positively miserable, rod-straight on Riley’s doorstep like a folded umbrella, all tired eyes and expressive eyebrows.

“Try anything and I’ll bash your head in,” Riley warns, opening the door wider.

The boy smiles wide like an orange peel and carries the pine tree inside, accidentally smacking Riley in the face with it.

“Shoes,” Riley grouses, refusing to help.

“Were you cooking?” the boy says when he spots the frying pan. “I’m good at _that_.”

“And are you any good at putting trees away before someone gets hurt?”

Once the pine tree is safely deposited in the hall, the boy spends an excruciating minute picking needles out of his stork’s nest of a hair. It curls to his ears, dark and coral-reef-like, tangled enough for something small to find hiding places there.

“Be honest,” Riley says once the boy’s done. “Are you here to steal from me?”

There are some valuables in the house, if one’s into dusty antics. Riley could do away with aunt Thelma’s portrait – _God rest her soul_ – but he’d rather keep the china, the candelabra, and, most importantly, the mole-eaten books.

“ _Steal_ from you?” the boy repeats, blinking too much. “I’m Noah.”

Riley sighs.

“ _Of course_ you are.”

“Excuse me?”

Riley waves and waits until the boy gets the clue and follows him into the kitchen. He cranes his neck on the way there and somehow manages to step on all the noisiest floorboards. 

“Water, floods, boats,” Riley explains impatiently, already reaching for the kettle. “What do you think about Eve being created from Adam’s rib anyway?”

The boy frowns and pats his chest down as if feeling for a missing rib of his own. It draws attention to the numerous holes in his hideous jumper – the colour of cooked spinach, at least two sizes too big – and by the time he’s done with the self-examination, Riley has counted six of those.

(Riley doesn’t have an opinion on people who have holey clothes, but he just might have an opinion on people who don’t mend them.)

“I don’t believe in all that,” the boy – Noah – says carefully.

Riley arches an eyebrow. “In ribs?”

“In Adam, and Eve, and the Garden, and the, the, and _Noah_.”

“Yes,” Riley says, exasperated. “But _what do you think about Eve being created from Adam’s rib_?”

Whoever gave you the idea, Riley’s grandmother said to him once, enraged, that stories had to be true?

“I think,” Noah says, slowly, as if he’s still deciding how to finish, “that everything – every _one_ – deserves to be created from scratch, as its own thing.”

Riley stares at him: a nose that looks like it’s been broken, acne scars, and eyes like a confession. He’s not as pale as Riley himself, but he looks like he hasn’t slept in days all the same. A thin, white scar cuts one of his eyebrows in two and hair doesn’t grow there.

“Is that tea you’re making?” Noah says with a blinding smile.

“Why?” Riley snaps, narrowing his eyes. “Do you not like tea?”

He wonders if tomorrow, everyone will have heard about how there’s a ghost living up in the old house, trying to poison people. He knows what he looks like – skin an unhealthy white like the belly of a cod, fingers like something that doesn’t necessarily exist, and his form drowning in the folds of his grandmother’s old bathrobe, big enough to trail to the ground and sweep the floor whenever he moves.

“You’re _prickly_ ,” Noah says with wonder, as if he’s never seen anything like Riley before. Perhaps he hasn’t – people like Riley don’t ever leave their houses, tidal islands or not.

“You’re obnoxious,” Riley retorts with a scowl. “Are you here to welcome me to the neighbourhood, then?”

Noah raises his eyebrows, clearly amused.

“The closest house is two miles away from here.”

Riley smiles sweetly.

“Perhaps you’re homeless.”

Noah raises his arm and then drops it fast, ears flushed red, as if he intended to sniff his armpit but thought better of it. He’s the sort of boy Riley’s mother would be charmed by, so much like those pink-cheeked, stuttering students of hers that she always tells Riley about, and that alone is reason enough to loathe him, but Riley prepares a mug for him and decides to hold off judgment for a little longer.

“It’s just that I cycle near here sometimes, and I saw that the light was on the other night,” Noah explains.

“So we’re _not_ neighbours?” Riley says, passing him the mug. Noah dumps a criminal amount of sugar in it and doesn’t bother stirring.

“I wanted to say hello,” he mumbles, defensive, even his neck, above where his Adam’s apple keeps moving, flushed a telling red.

“She didn’t have pearls or golden earrings or anything of that sort,” Riley informs him sternly. “You’re welcome to help yourself to whatever cheap jewellery you find in the house but, once you’re done, kindly—"

“Alright, alright!” Noah interrupts, eyes grown wide. “I’m here because I wanted to see the house!”

“And _steal_.”

“ _No_.”

Riley considers him: a miserable thing in socks that don’t match, mouth wide like a frog’s and eyes the colour of peeled courgettes. He doesn’t have the appearance of a skilled thief, but Riley knows all about wolves pretending to be sheep, and so he decides not to put the frying pan away just yet.

“It’s not haunted,” he tells Noah, carefully not thinking about the pear.

Noah stares, uncomprehending, and then his ears go red all over again. He’s like a twig stripped of bark, all wet, green wood. It’s off-putting at best, this sort of transparency, and Riley almost tells him to learn to pretend that he has skin, for God’s sake.

“I meant it, you know,” Noah says quietly, all earnest eyes. “I don’t believe in that stuff.”

“That stuff?” Riley snorts. “Adam and Eve were hardly ghosts.”

“Same difference,” Noah says, chewing on his sleeve. Riley bets he’s a chewer: bitten nails, bitten pens, bitten hoodie strings. “If I were any good at math, I’d be an architect.”

“Would you, now.”

Noah smiles.

“If I were a house, I’d want to be built next to this one.”

 _If you were a house_ , Riley thinks, _you’d have the ugliest carpets._

He can’t imagine how a wannabe architect can find the house worthy of attention: if anything, it’s a study in how _not_ to build. The walls stand uneven, swollen as if the place is bursting at the seams, the roof looks like a mangled fish with its scales missing, half the tiles gone, and the windows are a poor protection against the cold, draughts always tickling Riley’s ankles. There’s nothing imaginative about it either: four corners and a door painted the blue of tropical seas, no fence. Even the mailbox leaves much to be desired: too small and with a capricious lock that works often enough that a new one wouldn’t be worth the hassle but fails to work often enough to aggravate.

“I suppose you’ll want a _tour_ , then,” Riley says, allowing himself a weary sigh. Noah beams.

Inside, the house is both more and even less impressive, crammed with things that, depending on who’d be doing the selling, could go for thousands or fail to sell for pennies. It’s like a worn coat, once expensive, now threadbare and covered in patches, not-always-welcome surprises hidden in each pocket and the smell of things that don’t exist anymore clinging to it with an almost childish stubbornness. It’s a bit Frankenstein’s-monster too, the floors all clashing shades of wood, some rooms almost Spartan while others stifle with the abundance of ugly portraits, heavy drapes, and carpets that must be crawling with mites.

Before entering each room, Noah leans inside first, as if to check that no one’s there, and then crosses the doorstep with a sort of reverence that Riley initially mistakes for reluctance. He sighs sometimes, like it’s all too beautiful to bear, and it occurs to Riley that if Noah was wearing a hat, he’d take it off the way people do when they enter a church.

“I don’t see what’s so special about this place,” Riley says half an hour of wandering cluttered rooms later. Noah wipes dust off a huge mirror in one of the upstairs bedrooms with his sleeve and then makes a face when he catches sight of his reflection, as if he expected the thing to be a window instead. He pokes his tongue out, goes cross-eyed, laughs.

“It’s almost old enough to call this excavation,” he explains with childish excitement, all hummingbird hands. “There are houses you renovate, and then there are houses you reconstruct.”

Suddenly, Riley understands: In the tides’ hold, the house must look like a shipwreck, and Noah must be the kind of person who believes that the Titanics of the world ought to be pulled out of the water and turned habitable.

Later, once Noah has gone home – wherever home is – the kitchen tap really does start dripping, karma at its finest, and Riley can hear it all the way in the bed his grandmother died in. He listens to it, and tries to convince himself that the dripping is consistent, and not at all like a message coded in Morse.

*

Riley’s grandmother was the sort of person who wore curlers in her hair when shopping for groceries, spent her evenings throwing darts at pictures of politicians and handsome actors who’d never bothered learning of her existence and stopping by for tea, and preferred to buy her fish alive to kill herself before dinner – round-eyed in plastic bags filled with water and tied with a knot. She liked gossip, and she liked stories, and she liked silence, too: full of contradictions and big enough to comfortably fit them all inside her. She would call Riley sickly, prodding his arms and telling him that he’d make a poor chicken broth, no matter how many times he’d remind her that he was not, in fact, a chicken.

Pulling on a pair of her woollen socks, delightfully too-big, Riley realises, not without irritation, that his grandmother would like Noah Somebody too. Her and Riley’s mother shared a fondness for people who couldn’t cross a room without shattering something, tripping over the carpet, or walking into a piece of furniture. It was, perhaps, the only thing they had in common, which is why they stopped talking two decades before his grandmother’s death and just weeks before Riley’s birth. He never learned what it was that caused the falling-out, but he’s always suspected it must have had something to do with Riley’s father – his mother’s one-night-stand, he of the cheapest condoms one could find and so much like the man Riley’s grandmother had her only daughter with. Riley got to know – _learned_ , it felt like – Loretta Weir through attending the occasional family funeral and sneaking off on grocery runs with her under the pretext of meeting his friends. His grandmother would slap him on the back, heartily enough that he could feel old phlegm from his never-fully-healed colds come loose in his throat each time, and they’d talk about Edgar Allan Poe, Claudette Colbert, and hot-air balloons. _I dislike the current times out of spite_ , she told him once, tossing three boxes of Cheerios into her trolley. _Some people, they’re like those kids that always go, ‘are we there yet?’ and ‘how much longer?’ during car rides. I say, what are they all so excited about? The other day a storm tossed a plastic bag right on my doorstep. Once, it was milk bottles and warm newspapers, you know._

When a friend of hers called their house to let them know that, after not having heard from Loretta for a while, she used a spare key (spare key!) and let herself in only to find Riley’s grandmother dead in her bed, Riley cried and didn’t much care that his mother saw.

(She cried herself, later. He knows, because, the morning after, he found her pillow wet, a stain too big to have been left by drool. It was a relief, in a way, how he had reason not to hate her after all.)

Riley waited two months after the funeral before he told his mother that he needed a break, his instant coffee cooling on the table between them.

“A break from what?” she said, uncomprehending. “I thought you liked university.”

He didn’t, but she would never need to know that.

“The house needs sorting out anyway,” he said, evasive. At the time, his mother had been dating Andrew Someone for two months, and Riley had seen the spare toothbrush she’d bought in one of the bathroom drawers, the cardboard on the back of the plastic case half torn-off.

“But sweetie, is that really something you want?”

Three weeks later, he was packed and ready to go.

“Don’t drown, don’t fall off the roof, and don’t let ghosts eat you,” his mother told him, surrounded by paper cranes folded out of torn-out crossword puzzle pages. She’d gotten frustrated by ‘lethargy, listlessness,’ five letters down, and the origami was her little revenge.

“I can swim, I won’t be climbing roofs, and there are no ghosts there.”

Three weeks, one half-eaten pear, and three leaking taps later, Riley’s not so sure about that last bit.

“Hello?” he calls out. He spends longer than he’d ever admit waiting for a reply that never comes. 

It hits him when he’s washing the dishes and _not_ expecting a message from the leaking sink: ennui. He calls his mother to let her know, never mind that the crossword must be confetti by now, but she never answers the phone.

Date night, Riley remembers, and, around him, the house seems to sigh, as if it, too, can’t stand the very thought.

*

“You’re not the postman,” Riley complains when he finds Noah on his doorstep again.

“Were you expecting a letter at this time?” Noah says, all wobbly smile and nose rubbed red.

“I was expecting to be left alone at this time,” Riley replies irritably, but opens the door wider to let him in. It’s a cold evening, and the faster he gets Noah inside, the faster he can stop letting wind in, and what wind it is: almost strong enough to seem sentient, because how could anything that just is ever be this mean?

This time, Noah toes his shoes off right away. He gets tangled in his own jacket, struggling to peel it off, and Riley only calls him useless twice before pulling on one sleeve to help.

“I brought baubles this time,” Noah announces proudly. “For the tree,” he clarifies when the only reaction he gets is Riley’s blank stare.

Later, the kettle already on the stove, Noah watches eagerly as Riley opens the cardboard box and starts unwrapping the baubles.

“Toilet paper?” he says, wry.

“I ran out of tissue,” Noah explains, sheepish.

“They don’t match,” Riley points out, turning each bauble over in his hands. They’re in all sorts of colours, pictures painted on the glass: a frog perched on the side of a well, a goose flying through snow, a chimney sweep standing on a roof and staring at the moon. Some are covered in colourful stripes and have sharp tips, like St. Petersburg domes waiting to be placed atop a church.

“They’re not a set,” Noah admits, shifting in his chair. “Do you not like them?”

“It’s not even Halloween yet.”

“Yes,” Noah says, blinking far too much. “But do you not like them?”

Riley stares at him and thinks of how, this time, he forgot to grab a frying pan before opening the door.

How could he have forgotten?

“I don’t understand,” he says, puzzled.

Noah slides low in his chair until Riley can’t see anything but his mess of a hair and his courgette eyes.

“I make them,” he explains, bashful. “I’ve made them.”

Riley carefully puts the baubles away upon hearing that, suddenly terrified that he’ll drop them.

“I still don’t understand,” he confesses, settling them on the toilet paper, more careful than he’d be with blown eggs.

“Well, you need a blowpipe for the start—”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Noah goes so red that it can’t be healthy.

“Oh, um, well, I work at a Sainsbury’s in town, but I sell handmade things online, too—”

“That’s not what I meant _either_.”

Noah sighs, defeated, as if he’s known exactly what Riley meant all along. He sits up in his chair and puts his chin in his hands, for once watching Riley without a smile.

“Neighbour hospitality.”

“Except we’re not neighbours.”

“ _Hospitality_.”

Riley understands this. He always has. People give you something – they expect something back. Oscar Wilde and his talk of everything being about sex, when, really, everything is about payment. _Yes_ , even when all someone wants is a kind word, because can’t kindness be currency too?

“I ought to go and watch dust settle on furniture,” he says, cold, and pushes his chair back. “You’re welcome to stay and give yourself another tour.”

Later, when he hears the front door open and close, barely louder than a whisper, Riley finds the baubles still where he left them, box and all. Behind him, the floor creaks like footsteps and he thinks, with a sort of resignation, that it’s a trick as old as time: open the door and shut it, too, but stay inside, and then hide to wait. He doesn’t bother turning around, only counts the knives left on the drying rack next to the sink, but, in the end, the hit never comes.

He checks all the rooms after that, turning the light on in each one, but nothing. He remembers reading about nightingale floors in Eastern palaces, and remembers something he kept asking his mother when he was six, maybe seven, too: can you touch a ghost?

*

He doesn’t truly let himself believe it, not at first, but then he finds his porridge overturned on the kitchen counter, gluey milk dripping off the counter.

If he squints, the stain it forms on the floor is almost, almost shaped like the word ‘hello.’

Feeling silly, he writes his own ‘hello’ next to it, in peanut butter. After, he shuts himself up in the library, the only room in the house distracting enough to keep him from checking on the message every five minutes. Over the years, his grandmother collected so many books that, were one to dust them, by the time one would get to the last shelf, the first one would be covered in cobwebs all over again. There are encyclopaedias old enough to have prints of crayon drawings inside rather than photographs here, dictionaries in languages that his grandmother could only swear in, and obscure books such as a guide to the Victorian practice of hair-washing. There are also, of course, the classics – three editions of each one at least, half of them leatherbound and with pages yellowed like rotten teeth. When Riley opens some of the oldest ones, dust doesn’t rise, and his grandmother’s margin notes scream at him with red ink, all _you can do so much better than this old bastard, Jane_ and _no wonder you killed yourself, Ernest – if I were you, I’d do the same._

 _It’s cheating time itself_ , she explained to Riley once. _You only need a few evening to get through a hefty book, but in the story, decades pass. Wouldn’t you like to live through a few forevers, dear?_

Back then, he already knew to say no.

 _Anyway, I’m not saying that life is not a story_ , she went on back then, unbothered. _All I’m saying is that sometimes it’s a poor one, the chapters all out of order, the grammar all wrong, and don’t even get me started on the characters!_

Life, Riley knew, was _not_ a story. If it was, one would be able to cut chunks of it out, whole chapters fed to flame and never spoken of again.

Now, he reaches for the oldest copy of _We Have Always Lived in the Castle_ , one of his grandmother’s favourites, and stares, surprised, when it opens near the middle of its own accord, a ripped out notebook page shoved between two chapters like a bookmark. The edge where it’s been torn is like a mountain chain marked on a postcard, as if someone had been in a hurry, and in the middle of the page, there’s a single sentence written in black ink.

_you’re nothing like she said you were._

He counts to ten, waiting to see if his heartbeat will go back to normal, and then slowly makes his way downstairs. In the kitchen, the peanut butter message is all gone, only a few smears for the proof that it was ever there in the first place.

Riley imagines his grandmother entertaining the occasional guest and telling them all about her estranged daughter and her delicate-constitution grandson, unaware of something listening in.

“Right,” Riley says, pouring himself wine, this time straight into a mug. “Nice to meet you, too.”

Before taking the first sip, he raises the mug in a silent toast.

*

Riley stopped talking to his last friend when he was nine. It wasn’t a choice, not exactly. The friend’s name was Ben and his shoelaces didn’t match. He liked drawing lightning bolts and he wanted to be someone who studies how clouds come to be. One day he asked Riley how he’d spent his evening, and Riley stared at him, unable to remember how to lie.

(He’d master the art later but by then, it’d be too late for friendships.)

It was around that time that Riley started cutting pictures of people out of newspapers. Not to keep them, nothing like that. Quite the opposite, really – he couldn’t stand the thought of faces printed on folded pages, how someone had photographed those people, a trap of a sort. He imagined that having one’s photo taken wasn’t unlike being caught: once someone had your face, God knows what they’d choose to do with it. He would spend all his pocket money on those newspapers, and he’d screw the photos into balls to feed to the fireplace.

“I’m afraid you’ve lost me, honey,” his mother would say, blinking at him through the holes in the Daily Express, even though he’d never tried to explain.

“Why did you bring him here?” he asked once, trying to keep his chin up, the way brave people in films always would.

“Whatever do you mean?” she said, sweet like treacle, and after that, he never asked again. He made peace with silence and he made friends with absence: it became a relief to be alone, and he’d stand on bus stops, hand extended and curled around the fingers of someone who wasn’t there.

No one at all: the only person whose company he could bear. 

“When things are born,” he never asked his mother. “do they always scream?”

*

Noah refuses to give up, as if Riley has thrown down the gauntlet and called it a duel. The next time he visits, he’s holding a chessboard, and stands with his shoulder pressed against the doorway. When he raises his eyebrows, Riley is tempted to call it _lounging_.

He’s different – less shyness, more readiness to prove Riley wrong. It’s all well and good, except, frying pan in hand, Riley suddenly can’t remember what it was he thought about Noah that should require correction.

“I don’t know how to play chess,” he tries, and hates how Noah is suddenly so much like the letter Y, all long legs and strong shoulders and a question that Riley doesn’t know how to answer.

Noah doesn’t stutter. Calmly, he says, “I’ll teach you.” His eyes are always wet, as if he’s forever on the brink of tears, but tonight, it doesn’t look like sadness. Tonight, it’s all secrets: as if he knows something that hasn’t yet occurred to anyone else.

“I dislike stubborn people,” Riley says, considering shutting the door in Noah’s face. It’s not that he doesn’t want company – it’s that wanting company is unthinkable.

“I have the feeling that you dislike everyone,” Noah says, and oh, but he has no business sounding _fond_ of all things. They’ve only spoken twice, for God’s sake.

“I like Angela Carter,” Riley retorts, desperate to get through this without a stumble.

“Isn’t she dead?”

“Not all dead people are likeable,” Riley argues. He refuses to let some guy that looks like bats live in his hair and sounds like a saw out-stubborn him. “Take Margaret Thatcher.”

Noah tilts his head to the side, strangely serious. It’s all quicksand, without the shy smiles.

“I wish you’d let me in.”

Once inside, he pries the pan from Riley’s hands, so carefully that their hands never brush, and weighs it in his hand.

“I could kill you with it,” Riley blurts out, everything— everything off. It’s full moon, and he doesn’t like how shamelessly it sticks out outside the window, like a polished coin begging to be stolen.

“Sure, you could,” Noah admits, already on his way to the kitchen. He puts the pan away in one of the cupboards and to hell with him for guessing right away where Noah’s grandmother kept her pots. “The thing is, you could probably kill someone with a shoe or a hairpin, were you determined enough.”

“Chess?” Riley reminds him, wrapping his grandmother’s bathrobe tighter around himself until it’s like a snug cocoon. He wonders if the ghost is listening and wants to tell it: I promise, I don’t like him at all.

“Chess,” Noah says, fingers tapping the still-folded board.

Chess, his grandmother told Riley once, is the future. When you play it, it’s not about what is, but what will be.

“Well?”

“Not here,” Noah says, and finally: that sheepish smile. “I like the living room best.”

An hour later, after Noah didn’t insult him by letting him win, the pieces scattered all over the floor as a mixed result of Riley’s impatience and Noah’s clumsiness, Noah points to the ceiling, hand limp like a plant in the middle of dying.

“It’s as though we’re upside down,” he says, smiling up at the field of poppies painted over them.

“Upside down, or buried six feet under,” Riley mumbles. Noah’s laugh sounds like glass breaking, only without the aftermath, when you have to sweep it so no one hurts themselves. 

“We’re still alive, aren’t we?” he says, quieter than Riley would expect and not regretful, not exactly, but something that could be close to it. It’s like piano music: how sometimes, the same note can ring both happy and sad.

Somewhere in the hall, a floorboard creaks like a complaint.

*

Noah leaves the jar of peanut butter open on the kitchen table for the whole day, but nothing.

The next day, he tries chocolate spread.

The day after, honey.

Honey seems to do the trick: when he glances into the jar in the evening, there seems to be less of it than there was in the morning.

He makes tea with honey next but it stands untouched until it’s gone cold.

“Fussy,” Noah complains, and wonders if he should take the knock of a branch on one of the kitchen windows for a retort.

*

After the chess night, Noah starts coming over once every few days. Riley always forget to expect him: every time he says goodnight, watching Noah stumble away towards safe land, he thinks, _surely he’s had enough by now._

He’s yet to be right.

He tries to see the house the way Noah sees it: ceilings like something out of a fairy tale, stairs like an accordion forever on the brink of folding, and every tree Riley’s ever heard of turned into funny-shaped chairs. Instead, his eyes keep catching on the mould stains, the tears in the tapestries, and the holes in the carpets burnt by all the cigarettes his grandmother had dropped over the years.

Noah smokes too (“ _Occasionally_! A Sunday-only habit, if you will”), and it annoys Riley beyond reason, but not as much as it annoys him that Noah keeps coming over. Riley’s out here to be alone, but there’s something about Noah’s stupid, wet eyes that makes shutting the door in his face near impossible. Riley did once – locked it, too – and then picked up a book and read the same sentence fourteen times. He felt stupid when he got up to open the door again, sure that Noah must have gone home, but there he was: slouched on the doorstep, hands in pockets and an upside-down smile, which is to say, not a smile, not at all.

The thing with letting people in, Riley thinks, watching Noah suck on a teabag as if a whole cup wasn’t enough, is that once you do, they’re, well, _in._

“What’s up with you living here like some sickly lordling anyway?” Noah asks after spitting out the teabag. “Are you the black sheep of the family, exiled to the house about to be eaten by the sea?”

“It won’t flood,” Riley says with faux confidence. “I’m taking a break from university.”

“Was there a scandal?” Noah prods, delighted. “An affair with a teacher, and a married one, too!”

“I’m taking a break,” Riley repeats stubbornly. “The house needs sorting out anyway.”

“You’re not doing any sorting out, though,” Noah points out, amused. “What do you study anyway?”

Riley doesn’t even consider lying: it doesn’t feel like he needs to, with Noah having appeared as if out of nowhere, a routine in Riley’s life separate from everything else. _The closest house is two miles away_ , indeed.

“Psychology.”

Noah gapes.

“Oh, _what_.”

“It’s only that you don’t strike me as the type who’d sit and listen and nod and smile and ask strangers invasive questions while offering them cookies,” Noah says carefully. He’s fiddling with his cup, because he’s always fiddling with something: since they met, he’s already broken three, and soon, all Riley will have left of his grandmother’s china will be shards of porcelain sharp enough to serve as weapons.

“I think you’d start throwing staplers at people’s heads,” Noah adds with a fond smile.

He is, of course, right, and so Riley is taking a break. He chose psychology for purely selfish reasons: not to help others, but to decode himself. He felt himself a tangled knot, and had no clue how to undo it. Why he thought coursebooks and names over three syllables long would be just the thing to help him, that he knows not, but it only took one year of study for him to realise that he no longer wanted to understand: exhausted, he didn’t even want to scream.

“I could help you with the house, you know,” Noah says, and pretends to take a sip of the tea that’s no longer there. Riley’s mother would find the clumsy helplessness of it charming, but Riley only finds it clumsy, and helpless.

“I don’t want the place burnt to the ground, thank you very much, and do you know what, I don’t think you do, either.”

Noah has started bringing a sketchbook with him. He keeps a pencil behind his ear, and, sometimes, a crayon or two tangled in his hair, and he exhausts ceiling after ceiling, wardrobe after wardrobe, until every page is sketches on top of sketches on top of sketches. They’re quite good, the few Noah has let him glimpse, but Riley would never tell him.

Of course, by now, Noah must know that Riley would never tell him, and so the silence must be telling in and of itself.

“Aren’t you scared, living here all alone?”

Riley thinks about it a lot: alone?

*

He’s pretty sure that, save for a few mistakes, the Morse message from the tap is ‘how do you do.’

*

“Tell me about your grandmother,” Noah says one day, after Riley’s won his first game of chess.

“No,” says Riley, and that’s that.

*

‘I’m fine, thank you,’ he writes on the clouded mirror, finger squeaking on glass. ‘And you?’

*

“Tell me about your grandmother,” Noah tries again the next time Riley wins.

Riley is a hoarder of knowledge, and his mother and his grandmother are the only things – _people_ – that he has. They’re like one of those matryoshka dolls, the three of them, and Noah is a stranger, clumsily trying to pry it open.

He’s only asking, honey, Riley’s mother would say.

Riley’s mother is not here.

He’s only asking, dear, his grandmother would say.

His grandmother _can’t_ be here.

“She would talk to plants,” he says, slow, testing. Noah only smiles, no mean laughter. “She would talk to plants, and she would talk to strangers, too. She’d be all, ‘scuse me sir, would you move a little so I can grab myself some carrots? That’s one hefty moustache you’ve got there, by the way. Very… Joseph Stalin. I sure hope _you_ don’t shoot painters for getting it wrong.’”

Noah laughs, shaking his head.

“She liked men in uniform, and women in uniform, and she was too proud to make up with my mother. She’d always say that it was my mother who was too proud to make up with _her_ , and, of course, my mother would say the very same thing about _grandma_ …”

“Oh! Tell me about your mother?”

Riley stretches his leg under the table to kick him in the shin, and, later, Noah’s innocent smile seems to linger long after he’s left, like the Cheshire cat’s, only less mania and more warmth.

Riley, in two jumpers, and two pairs of socks, is still cold.

*

“I worry, is all.”

“I’m fine, Mum. I have… _neighbours_.”

“You do _not_! Don’t forget I grew up in that house.”

“Say, that dark spot on Aunt Thelma’s face, is it a melanoma?”

“A mole, I think.”

“A mole the size of a parking lot?”

“I’ll have you know that Aunt Thelma was considered a beauty in her day.”

“Only, you know that pear?”

“What pear?”

“How’s Andrew?”

“…”

“Oh, well, he’s Andrew. The other day he told me we should go ice-skating, as if he’d forgotten what season it was. Last Sunday, we accidentally set your cactus on fire.”

“Did it survive it?”

“Barely, but yes. Andrew survived too, thank you for asking.”

“I _didn’t_ ask.”

“I know, honey. I know.”

“You know that pear?”

*

They’re arguing over a missing chess piece when there’s a loud thump. They just catch a glance of the bird that slammed into the window before it falls, out of sight.

“Oh, Christ,” Noah says weakly. He squeezes his hand with the other as if he needs to hold on to something but doesn’t dare clutch at anything other than himself.

“I’ll have to put it in the trash, or it’ll rot,” Riley sighs.

“Oh, _Christ._ ”

Later, he puts the bird – brown and too small for something with a heart – in a plastic bag and drops it in the bin. He glances up at the sky, grey and indifferent, and wants to say, was that really necessary? When he gets back inside, he takes one look at Noah – eyes even more wet than usual, one hand still cradled in the other – and lies shamelessly.

“I couldn’t find it anywhere,” he says with a careless shrug. “It must have survived and flown away.”

It’s a sloppy lie, since he no longer has the plastic bag, but Noah – forever distracted – smiles like he hasn’t noticed.

*

It takes weeks of half-hearted searching before Riley finds the Bible. His grandmother was not a religious woman, but she liked to joke that she kept a copy somewhere in the house, out of sight, in case burglars ever tried robbing her of antiques. “It’s heavy enough to kill,” she’d explain, “and to kill a horse, at that.”

Riley is not religious himself, but he smiles when he discovers it at last – hidden inside a shoebox and buried under letters from one Theodora Mackle. When he opens the Bible, it’s to the page that describes the creation of Eve, and, for a moment, Riley stops breathing.

“Why, hello there,” he says to whatever’s out there. “And here I was, starting to think I must have imagined you.”

Nothing replies, but the page is proof enough, and Riley has no qualms about tearing it out. Later, he’ll put it under his pillow. Now, he struggles to decide whether he has any right to read through the letters.

(“Well, of course I loved someone once, you stupid boy,” his grandmother told him one winter, shaking her head in disbelief. “Hasn’t everyone?”

“Who was it?”

“A nun,” his grandmother said, smug, as if seducing women right out of Catholic devotion was a point of pride. “Her name was Theodora and she would send me the loveliest letters.”

“A _nun_?”

“I’d keep them inside a Bible, a joke of a sort. She almost left the nunnery for me, too.”

“ _Almost_?”

“What I’m saying is, we were happy for a while,” his grandmother continued with a melancholic smile. “I sent her a paper boat once, but it was hardly something she could sail away on.”

“ _For a while_.”

“Oh, stop it with the face!” she scoffed, outraged. “Don’t you go thinking things about love all because it’s not forever.”

She got it all wrong, of course: back then, Riley didn’t much care if love was forever or not. Already, he only cared whether it was on the right side of the door.)

“My mother wants to sell the house,” Riley tells the silence that smells like overripe melons and old dust. “I won’t let her.”

*

The next time Noah comes visit, he tells Riley that Riley is sick before saying hello. Riley, whose nose has been dripping like the kitchen tap, already knows, thank you very much.

“I mean, you look like you’re about to collapse.”

Riley’s grandmother used to say that God liked His irony, and Riley is inclined to agree, because a minute later, he does just that. When he comes to some time later, the sky outside the window the indisputable black of a charred match, he’s spread out on the living room couch and if he cranes his neck, he can just catch a glimpse of the kitchen, where Noah is doing something suspicious with Riley’s self-defense pan.

Riley’s been building card-houses and he looks around the room to check how many of them have collapsed. Miraculously, they’re all intact, as if Noah – clumsy, ungainly Noah – made an effort.

Childish as it is, Riley feels strangely wronged. Not disturbing the card houses – it was supposed to be Riley’s and the ghost’s. It’s like those nightingale floors – people who belong inside, and those who don’t. Trust Noah, who never fails to trip over a coat rack, to be quiet in this, of all things: sneaking into Riley’s life silent like a cat.

“What in God’s name are you doing?” Riley demands once he’s stalked into the kitchen. Noah jumps, and almost drops the wooden spatula that Riley has never seen before.

“I’m not sure what God has to do with it, but I’m cooking you dinner.”

“ _Vegetables_?” Riley says, peering into the pan. “Where did you get _vegetables_?”

“I had to run to town. I barely made it back before high tide.”

 _I don’t know why he always comes right before hightide_ , Riley told the ghost earlier in the day. _I don’t_ want _to know._

“Weren’t you worried I’d die in the meantime?”

“You’re too mean to die,” Noah says, dismissive. “I made soup, too.”

Riley takes the cover off the enormous pot.

“Is that _leek_?”

“I see how you’d have to make sure, what with your fridge being filled with nothing but jam and jam and jam.”

Riley doesn’t shop: he gets food delivered, and it’s hardly ever fresh. He freezes bread so it’ll last him weeks and eats sparely, so it’ll last even longer than that.

“I dislike green food,” Riley confesses. “It’s unnatural.”

“You’ll like this,” Noah says, and then arches an eyebrow. “Whatever do you eat every day?”

“Toast in the morning,” Riley admits, crossing his arms. “Toast in the evening.”

“Christ, but you’re begging for scurvy,” Noah sighs. “Don’t you get hungry?”

Riley does, but it’s to be expected.

_You don’t deserve things._

_I don’t deserve things._

“I dislike green food,” he repeats stubbornly.

“You’ll like this, because I made it.”

Riley tilts his head, unimpressed.

“I dislike you, too.”

Noah, who is too oblivious to realise that Riley means it – because he _does_ mean it – only laughs. It no longer sounds like glass breaking – instead, it’s like the enthusiastic sound of cracking ice.

“What I mean is, I kept thinking, how do I make this better? Your grandmother has a thousand-and-one spices.”

“ _Had_ ,” Riley corrects him, even though he likes how Noah used the present tense. “What’s so amazing about cooking, anyway?”

Noah hums, and seems to be genuinely mulling it over.

“It’s nothing like architecture,” he says at last with a puzzling smile.

“I thought you liked architecture?”

Noah grins like Riley’s the funniest person in the world.

“I do, but sometimes it’s too… numbers, you know? _Lines_.” He draws a rectangle in the air with the spatula, drops of sauce flying every which way. “All corners, see?”

Riley considers it, and then thinks of how the house is a slumped thing, like an elderly person slouching in wait for a bus.

“What would you even build?”

Noah stares out the window before answering. In the pan, the sauce the vegetables are stewing in makes a hissing sound.

“I’d design bridges.”

Riley groans, because _of course_ he would. Later, they eat on the couch, listening to the patter of unexpected rain.

“Will you lend me an umbrella?” Noah says on his way out, after Riley has managed to successfully avoid admitting that the food was nice.

“If I lend you an umbrella, eventually, you’ll have to come here to return it.”

Noah stares at him.

“Look—”

“If you say something like ‘if you don’t want me here, just say so’, I’ll strangle you, I swear,” Riley tells him gravely.

Noah smiles a puppy smile. Puppies, Riley thinks desperately, and something about them getting kicked.

“Because it’d be preferable to having to correct me?”

“Because _stop talking_.”

Later, once Noah has gone, wrapped in Riley’s grandmother’s old raincoat, Riley pokes the card houses one by one until they all collapse and pretends it’s Noah who did it. By the time he’s done eating a second serving of the soup, he almost believes it, too.

*

“If love is giving without expecting anything in return,” Riley told his grandmother once, after she’d paid for her groceries in ten-pence coins, “then there is no love.”

He knew she didn’t agree – she’d sent her Theodora a paper boat, after all, and without expecting her to come sailing, too – but he couldn’t understand why, for once, she didn’t _argue_.

*

When Riley was six, he and his mother would play a game. The game was called “How many Rileys can fit inside a cupboard?” They would open them one by one, and he’d crawl inside. Once there, he’d stare at his mother expectantly, and she’d tilt her head, squint at him, and make a humming sound.

“Quite a lot of leg room in this one, mmm?” she’d says, unrolling a measuring tape.

Three years later, he’d try to crawl into one of those cupboards that could only fit one Riley, and he stills remembers the horror he felt when he realised that he’d grown since then.

*

Noah is all expansive gestures, but coy, all skidding on the slippery floors in his socks, but cheeks going red over stupidest things. He talks to Riley’s grandmother’s old cuckoo clock, trying to coax it into screaming the full hour when it’s quarter to, and, after that first time, he keeps cooking Riley dinners. He tries to fix the leaking taps but only makes them leak worse, and he topples a chair over when changing a lightbulb – ends up holding on to the chandelier and screaming something about death and unwritten wills and his preferred cemetery. He tells Riley all about his favourite bridges without Riley having to ask, and he leaves behind a jumper one night.

The jumper is a stretched, yellow thing, and there’s something worryingly deliberate about how Riley decides not to wear it – as if it means something that had to decide in the first place.

“What I like most about the house is that every room is a different colour,” Noah says once, leafing through Riley’s grandmother’s Bible. “Oh, that’s quite nice. _You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt_.”

“Oh, don’t,” Riley says, rolling his eyes.

“It’s underlined in red,” Noah says, eyes briefly jumping to Riley, then sliding away. “I like it.”

“You _would_.”

Later, Riley polishes the piano keys, and Noah sits with his sketchbook propped on his knees, chewing on the tip of his pencil.

“ _What_?” Riley snaps when he catches him looking.

“I’m not looking at _you_ ,” Noah says, the corner of his mouth quirking up like a spring let loose. “I’m looking at the mirror.”

Riley feels himself blush and wonders how it came to this: even as a recluse, he’s an utter failure.

*

His grandmother didn’t play the piano, but she kept one in the house.

(“Theodora played,” she explained once, after he’d asked her to describe her living room. Back then, he wouldn’t dare visit, afraid that his mother would know somehow – perhaps she’d smell it on him, the scent of her childhood itself. “I never asked her to move in with me, but promised her that my door would always be open to her, and I couldn’t have it be just _words_. I never told her, but I bought sheets in that shade of blue she liked best, and I kept her favourite candles in the house, and I got the piano, too.”)

The piano wakes him up at dawn, the sunrise unfocused outside, a poached egg of a thing. It’s a few low notes, then higher, then higher still, the sounds climbing like someone rising to their tiptoes. By the time Riley stumbles into the room, it’s empty, and the piano keys are still.

Later, he opens all the windows, even though that’s how he caught a cold: by airing the house too much. He stands in the draught and thinks, are you here too? Are you cold too?

He spends the whole weekend waiting for someone to sneeze.

*

On Halloween, someone knocks on the door, and it’s not Noah – the sound is nowhere near hesitant enough.

“Treat or treat,” the kid on the doorstep says, a pillowcase with three round holes for the eyes and the mouth clumsily cut in it pulled over his head. “I’m a ghost.”

“You’re supposed to say ‘trick or treat,’” Riley corrects, staring into the boy’s empty, pumpkin-shaped basket.

The boy sighs.

“Do you have candy, or not?” he demands, irritable like he’s been at it the whole day. Perhaps he has been. He can’t be more than seven, and Riley remembers being this small: how, back then, the world was still something you could expect gifts from.

“Not,” he says, moving to close the door before the kid decides to kick him or something of that sort.

“You mustn’t let him in again, Mister,” the kid says seriously, stretching his arm towards him. Riley just barely catches the door – worse reflexes, and he’d have broken the kid’s arm.

“Excuse me?”

“The boy with the hair,” the kid says, twirling his finger as if he can’t think of a better way to explain curls. “My mum, she saw him here, waiting on the doorstep, and she says nothing good will come of it.”

“Does she, now.”

“Mmm,” the kid says, scuffing his shoe. “She says he’s a bad egg. ‘He’s a bad egg,’ she says, ‘that one.’”

“Look—”

“I don’t know much about eggs, but one went rotten in our fridge once,” the boy continues, unperturbed. “It stank something awful.”

“Listen—”

“She says that he’s dangerous. A killer, like the whales, only no fins.”

Riley closes his eyes and wishes for high tide. There’s already a rushing sound in his ears, like water flooding a room.

“She says he ought to be punished for what he did,” the kid goes on in a monotone voice. “She says I can’t ever go near him or he’ll take a rock and bash—”

“ _Enough_!” Riley yells. “I don’t have candy, alright? Now get the fuck off my property!”

He shuts the door, too, but not before watching the boy scramble away, the empty basket deserted on the ground. Riley remembers the choked sound Noah made when that bird hit the window, and kicks the thing, twice.

*

Riley’s grandmother adored autumn.

“Every tree looks like a fireplace, and horror novels get so delightfully exciting,” she explained once, picking apples. She was very particular about it: too perfect, and she wouldn’t buy them for fear of pesticides, too bruised, and she’d click her tongue in distaste.

 _We Have Always Lived in the Castle_ might have been her favourite Shirley Jackson, but she loved _The Haunting of Hill House_ too, all her six copies of the book stuffed full of post-it notes. One afternoon, she talked about it for so long that Riley nearly missed his last bus home, all flying hands and clumsy pauses for breath, mid-word rather than between sentence clauses.

“Has there ever been a more chilling sentence than ‘silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone’?” she said, excited, and forgot to apologise when she walked straight into a passer-by.

Riley smiled and didn’t tell her that, for him, there was nothing chilling about it – instead, it seemed unbearably sad.

*

After Halloween, Riley watches Noah so rudely that, were Noah anyone else, he’d surely yell at him. He stares when Noah talks to the stew (‘be good, please” and “yes, just like that” and “oh, bless you”) and stares when Noah paints Victor Enrich-like buildings on Riley’s mugs, and stares when Noah takes the knives in the cutlery stand and turns them tip-down, as if he doesn’t trust Riley not to stumble and hurt himself.

(When he reaches for the first knife, Riley’s heartbeat doesn’t skip a beat, and he hates himself like this: guard down, no Pavlovian reaction.)

“Can you think of anything sadder,” Noah says one day, “than how wars have numbers?”

He cries when he chops onions, cries when he chops leek, and keeps pushing his hair – too long to keep out of his eyes and too short to tie – behind his ears. Riley watches that too – how the curls never stay there for longer than a minute or two.

He keeps singing Helen Gross’ _Undertaker’s Blues_ , coffin-voice to match the coffin-song.

“What’s the use of singing about cemeteries?” Riley says, incredulous.

“What’s the use!” Noah snorts. He – Riley knows by now – scorns dividing things into useful and not. “Cemeteries are beautiful.”

Riley hasn’t been to his grandmother’s grave since the funeral, and he almost asks Noah to go and check if there are any flowers there. Almost sends him there with a candle.

“You don’t really think they’re lonesome, do you?” Riley guesses. “Cemeteries?”

“Oh, no,” Noah says with a somewhat melancholic smile. “Not at all.”

Cemeteries, Riley decides, are the opposite of houses, and he thinks he could like them, too.

*

“ _And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept; He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place_ ,” Riley reads slowly, the Bible spread on his knees. “ _Then the rib which the Lord God had taken from man He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man_.”

The silence that follows is almost convincing.

*

Once, Noah comes in straight from the rain, dripping water all over the place. His shirt clings to his collarbones, and his curls stick to his forehead and he has a forehead, and a nose, and a mouth, huh, how about that.

Riley wonders if his skin would be cold or hot to the touch, and spends more time than is allowed trying to guess.

The hair on Noah’s arms, Riley notices that evening, is just long enough to wish on.

*

Riley never knew his father. You came to be through parthenogenesis, his mother would laugh when he was small, and he liked the thought too much to shout over how it couldn’t be. It was just the two of them and their little house, the walls of which they could repaint every week if they so wished. Once a month, his mother would make a cheesecake and have neighbours over – each time, Riley would kick his legs under the table and count in his head, waiting for them to leave. Once, after he got to three thousand, he faked a stomach ache so his mother’s friend would go.

Of course, eventually, everything went to hell. It started with the arrival of one Harry Morgan, and it would never end. Harry, he of ‘I like my coffee black and I like my newspapers warm.’ He had a sunburnt face even though it’d rained all summer, he was the proud owner of a hunting license, and he would stay for years.

After that first day he came over, all of Riley’s eyelash wishes would be the same.

*

With Noah, it’s a little off, same as with everyone Riley’s ever met, save for his mother, but then, he never actually had to meet _her_. After all, there was never a him before her: he’d always known her, and that’s just the thing, isn’t it?

The only difference is that Noah, just like Riley’s grandmother, and unlike anyone else, keeps coming back.

One evening, he comes over armed with dried autumn leaves and starts gluing them to the windows.

“Explain,” Riley demands, unimpressed.

“You have to celebrate these things,” Noah says cheerfully.

“ _What_ things?”

“All of them!”

Later, Riley stands in front of one of the windows, and tries to figure out how having leaves stuck to it on the inside is supposed to be picturesque, but having them stuck to it on the outside means the weather is shit. Noah comes up to stand behind him, a few inches taller, and Riley remembers that stupid kid with his stupid trick-or-treating and how couldn’t possibly have been right.

They reflect in the window – Riley pale, lips a vivid red like he’s been biting them, because he _has_ been, Noah smiling like he’d love nothing more than to frame the moment like a photo – and it occurs to Riley that if he leaned back now, just a little, he’d be pressed up against Noah. This time, he doesn’t even have to wonder if Noah would be warm – he can _feel_ that he would be.

“See? Isn’t it lovely?” Noah says, and it takes Riley a moment to realise that he means the leaves. When he does, he leans forward, nose pressed to the glass, and tries to remember how to breathe.

*

 _Sometimes I look at you and wonder_ , Riley’s grandmother told him once, _if you know that you’re just a boy and not a fortress._

*

Two weeks into November, Noah stays for so long that by the time he’s remembered he ought to be going, it’s high tide all over again.

“I can just wade through,” he says without any certainty, slouched on the doorstep and staring at the stretch of water separating them from land.

It’s late, it’s dark, and there’s a storm coming. There’s a storm, full stop, lightning still distant, but electricity already gone and only candles for light. Noah holds one up and stares at its flickering reflection in the water like he’s never seen anything scarier.

“Can’t you swim?” Riley demands, intrigued more than sympathetic.

Noah snorts, but it’s hardly convincing: his lip, mercilessly bitten raw, trembles something awful. “It’d be up to my waist, tops.”

“You could trip and drown then.”

“Yes, thanks.”

“How about you stay?” Riley says, and almost does something stupid like steering Noah back inside by the shoulders. “You don’t have anyone waiting for you, do you?”

Noah gives him a measuring look but doesn’t bother arguing: he reeks of loneliness, and must know it.

“I wouldn’t want to impose,” he murmurs, quick to glance back towards the water, as if he can’t allow himself to let it out of his sight.

“Think of all the imposing you’ve already done,” Riley says cheerfully.

“I thought you didn’t like me being here?”

“No, you didn’t,” Riley says simply. “If you really thought that, you wouldn’t keep coming. I know this about you.”

Noah glares at him.

“I have a couch.”

“Yes,” Noah says, wry. “I’ve noticed.”

He does end up staying, but he doesn’t move through the house with the same almost-confidence he’s had for the past few weeks. It would be easy to chalk it up to the power outage, but Riley thinks it must be something else.

“You’re scared of the storm, aren’t you?” Noah says with a deep frown.

“Why? You think I wouldn’t have offered otherwise?”

A not-quite-bitter smile.

“I _know_ you wouldn’t,” Noah says, touching the wick of a candle to another in order to light it. “I dislike storms myself.”

“Too angry for you, are they?” Riley guesses. Half an hour later, when thunder causes the glasses in one of the kitchen cupboards to rattle, Noah crawls under a table.

A killer, the kid said, but Riley can’t imagine Noah ever hurting anyone: he’s a bit of an unfinished thing, something disgustingly human lost in the creation, and Riley bets he wouldn’t even know how.

For Halloween, he made pumpkin cannelloni, pumpkin shepherd’s pie, and pumpkin soup, and only remembered to ask if Riley liked pumpkin after it was all done, every flat surface in the kitchen covered by dishes, and Noah’s cheeks redder than Riley had ever seen them before.

“My grandmother,” Riley says, crawling under the table too, “liked storms.”

“Crazy woman,” Noah mumbles, hugging his knees. “What else did she like?”

“Sage, and Paganini, and wearing crocs,” Riley lists off. “Stories.”

“What kinds of stories?”

For the first time since he can remember, Riley feels himself smile.

“ _All_ kinds of stories.”

Around them, the windows rattle, the candles flicker, and the floorboards sing, but the house stands proud and bears it.

The next day, Riley wakes in the early morning, light drawing extraordinary patterns on the floor of his grandmother’s bedroom. It occurs to him that he could drag Noah up here to draw them, but it’s only six a. m., and when he finds Noah curled up on the living room couch, he doesn’t have the heart. He looks cold under the thin sheet, and he looks something else with his hands loosely curled around nothing. Riley frantically searches the house for blankets, anything that doesn’t smell like death or has more holes than Swiss cheese, and ends up folding two over Noah. The wrinkle between his eyebrow doesn’t smooth out, so Riley climbs to the attic and searches trunks he never dared touch before until he comes across something that is technically a curtain. He drapes that over Noah, too, careful not to wake him, and nods, satisfied.

It’s only as Riley’s making a pot of coffee that he realises what it’ll look like once Noah wakes up: three extra layers over him, stinking of desperation. He sneak back into the living room, begging the unpredictable floorboards for cooperation, and stands over Noah, contemplating whether he’d rather keep face or have Noah be cold.

He ends up staring, and wonders if he could blame the blankets on the ghost.

(And the ghost _is_ kind enough for the gesture: once, Riley found a bucket rolling on its side, the soapy water he’d prepared spilled all over the floor like a clumsy attempt at help in housework.)

In the end, Riley stuffs the blankets in the wardrobe and tucks the sheet around Noah until he looks like a candy inside a wrapper, hoping it’ll be enough.

*

One afternoon, he finds that all his new card houses have collapsed, but he can’t tell if it’s the ghost who did it or the wind let in through the open window.

“I suppose you like that I can’t tell,” Riley says wryly, collecting the cards.

*

In the end, Riley ruins it all quicker than a blink: like a collapsing domino line.

A fucking card house of a thing.

“You wouldn’t believe the things you can find on the internet,” he says one afternoon. Noah, who’s helping him get rid of cobwebs, glances at him over his shoulder, broom in hand, and it’s something Riley will remember for a long time: the lines of his back, like a collapsing building, and why does everything always end up falling?

“What now?” Noah says, already amused. “Is it one of the Kardashians? I didn’t know you even _had_ internet here.”

“It was a story about a boy who’d been bullied at school,” Riley says carefully. “All bruises under clothes, dead insects shoved down his throat, books dumped in the toilet.”

“How unpleasant,” Noah says, still cleaning the cobwebs, and Riley thinks what he’s never had the courage to ask: why are you _really_ here?

“It might have been the acne, or the cheap clothes, or how he was friends with girls: you know how it is.”

Noah is teetering on a chair, trying to reach the ceiling, and he’s almost got it when he stops.

“Why are we doing this?” he says, frowning at the broom’s brush. “Cobwebs, they were once houses too.”

_They were once houses too._

“And it was awful, all the time, every day, because kids can be cruel, right? So the boy would get pushed down the stairs, and spat on, and thrown rocks at. They would place his ear between the blades of a scissors and tell him to hold his breath for two minutes or else, things like that. Dangerous things, but hardly— hardly. And then, the worst of all the bullies found the boy by the sea.”

“And spiders,” Noah says, voice shaky, hands shaky, everything earthquake. “Don’t they have a right to live, too?”

“And the bully, the biggest one, the meanest one, thought it’d be fun – wouldn’t it just be fun? – if he held the boy’s head down, submerged, face scraping rocks.”

“I mean, I’m not doing this anymore,” Noah says, almost crying, and gives the broom a shake. “What did the spiders ever do to anyone anyway?”

“And so the bully started counting. He thought, I’ll count until I get bored, but it wasn’t boring at all: not the trashing, not the gurgling, not the blood.”

“Is there anything about spiders in the Bible?”

“And the boy couldn’t breathe, and it’d lasted well over two minutes, and so he blindly grabbed a rock and smashed it into the side of the bully’s head.”

“I bet not! They’re just spiders, after all.”

“Over and over and _over_ _again_.”

“WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?!”

Riley stares at what he’s done: Noah, eyes wide, face a grimace of pain, chest rising and falling far too fast, hands all grief. It’s cruel and it’s unforgivable, but Riley doesn’t regret it, because it’s almost beautiful, too: the most successful exorcism he’s ever carried out.

 _After you’ve broken somebody’s heart_ , his grandmother half-joked once, _they come back to kill you, or they don’t come back at all._

Riley almost says something ridiculous like _take care of yourself_. 

_Take care of yourself because I don’t have the courage to do it for you_.

It’s high tide, but Noah doesn’t even hesitate: he jumps off the chair, crosses the room, and slams the front door behind himself. Riley watches him through the window – rooting for him, even after everything – and it hurts like a sledgehammer when Noah doesn’t even hesitate before wading through water, even though he fears it so, and rightly, too.

The house about to be eaten by the sea, he called it, but he kept coming anyway.

Riley spends the whole evening trying to feel glad, but he never quite succeeds: all that so he could feel safe, and surprise, surprise, he still doesn’t, not at all.

*

He saw Frida Kahlo’s _Wounded Deer_ in a book once, and couldn’t understand why there were so many arrows. He counted them, horrified, and thought, isn’t once enough?

It took him until he turned nine to instead start wondering, _why_ isn’t once enough?

*

“Talk to me?” Riley says to the ghost.

*

Harry would never touch Riley’s mother, but it didn’t take him long to find all of Riley’s hiding places.

*

“ _Talk to me_ ,” Riley begs.

*

Parthenogenesis, he would tell himself, hidden inside a suitcase down in the basement, his last frontier.

Parthenogenesis.

*

“Talk to me!” he yells.

*

The way he looked at things like screwdrivers, steak knives, and can openers changed: they suddenly became something he could be threatened with.

They became something he could use, too, but he never would. He never would.

*

“Why won’t you talk to me?” he demands.

*

“You don’t deserve things,” Harry said one day, a shard of glass pressed to Riley’s skin. He never broke it, never drew blood, but the possibility of it was, Riley thought, worse than the real thing.

A promise of a sort, and Harry was one to keep those. 

*

“Be like that then!” he shouts.

*

“Why, aren’t you a sickly little thing?” his grandmother said at somebody-or-other's funeral, blowing cigarette smoke out of her mouth.

I am a dead thing, Riley didn’t say. Throw me in the ditch with the woman – it’s all the same.

*

“He’s right, you know!” he says, helpless.

*

 _And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept; He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place_ , Riley read in the Bible once, and it was the Bible, so it had to be true.

 _Then the rib which the Lord God had taken from man He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man_ , and how nice, that the first people who loved each other had never been strangers that had to meet.

*

“Spiders have the right to live, too!”

*

Rapunzel’s tower – has there ever been anything lovelier than that?

“Why don’t you ask Harry to play hide-and-seek with you?” Riley’s mother said once, tired of Riley’s insisted tugging on her apron.

Riley knew better than to tell her that he and Harry had been playing it for months.

*

(When Riley lets himself think about it, he wishes that the past was something he could pry open like a can. He imagines going back in time and hurting those bullies before they could even think about hating Noah, and he hates himself for it a little, because he’s long made peace with past being untouchable, and never felt this insistent need to rearrange it for _himself_.)

*

“It’s just you and me,” Riley says, pouring two glasses of wines. “Don’t you understand?”

Over the next week, he leaves jars opened and puts cups of tea and coffee all over the house. He drapes his warmest jumpers over chairs, and never airs out the bathroom after showers so the steam on the mirror will stay longer. He puts post-it notes on the fridge, and on tables, and on walls, and he leaves pens in all colours uncapped. He orders letter pasta and spills it all over the kitchen counter when it arrives. He tears out crossword-book puzzles and drops them all over the house, leaves an unfinished game of cards in the middle of the living room floor, and draws a noughts-and-crosses grid in an open notebook. Every morning, he says ‘hello’, and every evening, he says ‘goodnight.’ He eats nothing but toast, but prepares it for two: two knives, two plates, two cups of milk.

At the end of the week, he makes a list:

2 overturned mugs

1 knocked-over candelabrum

Missing honey – messy traces on the table

Another short piano sequence

1 jumper dragged across the room and deserted by the pine tree that is still there

1 overturned pine tree 

He’s about given up and decided that whatever haunts the house is disinterested in making an acquaintance when he finds the letter.

*

It’s the loneliness that causes him to pull a copy of _The Haunting of Hill House_ off the shelf – he’s not above admitting that. He lets the pages spread until it’s more accordion than book, and it’s only when he chooses one at random that the sheet of paper falls out.

His heart does a strange thing when he picks it up and recognises the slanted handwriting.

 _Hello_ , the letter – because it is a letter – says. _You’re nothing like she said you were, but, somehow, you’re exactly like she said you were, too. A paradox, but that’s fine because she seemed to like those. I wonder what you like – even now, it’s hard to tell. _

Riley’s hands shake so bad that he can barely read, but he reads on.

_I doubt you’d like me saying so, but the house suits you. I did not expect this: I knew the house before, and you didn’t sound like someone that could ever belong here. ‘_

_He’s a silly boy’, she would say. ‘Keeps lying to everyone, but oh, the lies he tells himself! He has freckles, you know, and he dislikes the sun – I can tell – but the sun, oh, the sun just adores him. He’s a bit prickly, I won’t deny it, but when you get to know him better, he’s actually a sweetheart. He’ll search his pockets for breadcrumbs to throw to pigeons and when he sees empty cans on the street, he picks them up and puts them in the bin. He asked me about my food allergies before he bought me one of those hazelnut lattes, and he says that he’s not sure that he’s the best person to pick at the mess in people’s heads. Isn’t it sad, he said once, that we need psychologists at all?’_

_‘Once I told him: I could live without electricity because I already have. Once he told me: I could live without electricity because light draws things in.’_

_You never dust anything, Riley. You never fix things, either, and I think that what you’re doing is letting the house die. I think that without her in it, you don’t see the point. I think that you decided the house a ship, and named yourself its captain, and I think that you have this idea that you’re going down with it._

_(She was right about the sun, by the way. It does adore you, and, truth be told, so do I.)_

No signature, nothing on the other side, nothing more inside the book, but it’s the second one Riley’s found and it means something. Doesn’t it mean something?

Riley grabs all the other books on the shelf, one by one, and shakes, but only pages worked loose over the years fall out, covered in print from top to bottom and no hand-writing tilted to the side like a line of trees bent by wind. No matter. He starts on another bookshelf and, after a dozen more books, finds a second letter. A few dozens more, and another. Another, another, another. Soon, there’s a mountain of paperbacks growing in front of him and he’s holding three, five, ten letters, all addressed to him.

He sags against the now-empty bookshelves and doesn’t breathe, too busy feeling.

*

The phone rings, but Riley is too busy waiting for the ghost to show itself – _them_ selves – to pick up.

*

_She said that you were the sort of person who’d gently shake people awake in public transport. All ‘I apologise for waking you, ma’am, but I worried you’d miss your stop.’ ‘He explained it to me once: how he couldn’t think of anything worse than waking in an unfamiliar place full of unfamiliar people.’ I heard her say it, and I thought of all the times I was shaken awake by an angry driver at the very last stop on the way to – where exactly? – and I wished (oh, how I wished) that you were someone I too could meet on a bus._

*

When Riley was eleven, his homeroom teacher smiled at him and asked him to approach the map she’d unrolled at the front of the room.

“Would you show us where you’d most like to go, Riley?” she said, and Riley stood there with the pointer she handed him, trying to find their town on the map.

“I don’t want to go anywhere,” he said in the end, frustrated. “I want to stay here, while everyone else goes away.”

Everyone laughed like they thought he couldn’t possibly mean it, but he’d never meant anything more.

*

_She said that the two of you had been walking down the street when you stopped in front of a shop window and pointed to a sparkly red thing. This, you said. This would look lovely on you._

_Come off it, she laughed. Where would I wear something like this?_

_Where wouldn’t you? you said simply. Then, almost like an order, you told her to try it on._

_Only if you try it on first?_

_And you did. You did. It hang loose on you, but you smiled, wry, and curtsied, too. It did fit her, even though she thought she was the size of a barn, and when you twirled a circle with you finger, she was only too happy to spin for you._

_Would you like me to steal it for you? you offered, all gentlemanly._

_No way! she said, pretending to be scandalised. You’re a good one, aren’t you? You wouldn’t._

_Some people deserve things, you said, grave. You deserve things. _

_I swear, she said after she finished telling the story, sometimes I find myself thinking of apologising to my daughter, only so she’d let me see him every now and then._

_If I had known how to tell her to do it, I would have, Riley. If I had known what to do to get you inside this house earlier, I would have. How selfish of me, I know, but listen – I thought, if he was here, if I could meet him, I would tell him: you deserve things, too._

_*_

Riley hasn’t been airing the house as much, but the smell of the last thing Noah cooked for him is long gone anyway.

*

_She said that she told you that to love was to feed and that to love was to keep someone warm. She said that, one winter, you’d spent weeks staring at her chapped hands until, one day, you dared take them in yours and tried to rub them warm. She said – and she said it laughing – that you’d pretended to be annoyed, of all things._

_(He’s good at pretending, she said. He played a birch tree during a school show when he was seven, but shsh, he has no idea I was there, and neither does his mother.)_

_Later, when it almost, almost snowed in December, you got her a hat, and it seemed odd to her, how you barely looked at the shop assistant when paying for it, as if, besides Loretta, there was no one else in the world._

_I know this about you, Riley, and I’ll never unknow it: how you loved her enough to want her warm._

*

The pear seems whole on some days, half-eaten on others, and when Riley throws a dart at Aunt Thelma’s face, it bounces off.

“Hello?” he says and quiet, quiet, quiet. When his mother calls, he can’t find the energy to pick up.

*

_She said that one day you’d asked her if there were spiderwebs in her house. She told you there were many, and you asked her if she could, please, try and free whatever insects would get caught in them before the spiders could eat them._

_She said that she’d told you that was the world: things eating each other, circles, carousels. “It has to be like this,” she’d explained to you. “So we can keep spinning.”_

_You said, I understand, but can you do it for me all the same?_

_I watch you sometimes, and I know that you don’t free insects when they get caught in spiderwebs. I hope it doesn’t mean that you’ve made your peace with the world being a carousel. I hope that’s not why you’re here._

_(Though, really: it doesn’t matter why you’re here. What matters is that you are.)_

*

“Love is something you have to let in,” Riley’s mother told him once, but look where it got her.

“Love is something you have to let in,” Riley’s mother told him once, but look where it got him.

*

_She said that she’d asked you if you believed in God, once. She said that she’d asked you if you believed in God, once, and that you smiled at her, amused like she’d just spilled something all over herself. “It’s quite simple for me,” you told her, prying shopping bags from her hands, even though, out of the two of you, you were the one who looked like you were about to keel over. “I believe in God when Mum laughs. When she’s sad, I don’t.”_

_I heard that, Riley, and I thought, oh. I heard that, and I think that’s when it started – this shy thought that would take months to grow big: how I decided I’d try to believe in God if I ever met you._

*

He thinks he’d feel better if he could hold the baubles Noah left here in his hands, but he’s too scared to touch them, lest he breaks even one.

*

_She said that you’d first met at a funeral. Josie Something, almost a relation, and she sought you out because you had ‘that Weir almost-red hair,’ and ‘that lovely Weir scowl.’_

_“You’re my grandson, aren’t you?” she said, sidling up to you in a cloud of cigarette smoke. “I remember you from when you had no teeth. She only let me see you once.”_

_“I have teeth now,” you snapped, and flashed them like you were about to bite her. Right away, you remembered where you were and smiled apologetically, smoothing out your blazer. She didn’t tell you, but she liked the growling better._

_“Does she ever talk about me?” she asked you, trying to sound nonchalant._

_“Did you know,” you said, conversational, “that she almost married the devil?”_

_I watch you sometimes. I watch you in your trailing bathrobe, how you keep touching things as though you miss touch but won’t allow yourself anything alive. All the stories she told me about you—_

*

“So you talked to her, then?! You sat and talked to her?!”

“And why won’t you talk to me, mmm?”

“Well, screw you, too!”

*

_All the stories she told me about you— you might be unbearable, but whenever I close my eyes now, you’re there on the inside of my eyelids._

*

Riley is sitting with his back to the kitchen wall, a knife to his wrist.

“I don’t want to be doing this, but—”

He sighs.

“I hate doing this, but please talk to me, or…”

He makes a small cut, just the tiniest thing. He counts to ten. He counts to twenty. He counts—

“Didn’t you say you a _dored_ me?”

He puts the knife to his neck next, though it’s half-hearted at best. When the ghost doesn’t appear, he’s tempted to keep the knife where it is and make a cut there too anyway, but he drops it instead.

If only the doorbell rang. If only there was someone to threaten with a frying pan.

*

Riley has wrists so thin that one could circle them with two fingers and do damage, and once, someone did.

 _Show me where it hurts_ , his mother would say when he was younger, rotating his wrist for him, but he didn’t have a time machine, and so he couldn’t explain that where it hurt most was in the past, fingers like old leather squeezing and squeezing and never letting go.

With Harry, it started slowly: a glass put away too loudly, a chair pushed back so suddenly that it’d topple over. That first time, Riley’s mother was in the garden, singing – and bless that garden, curse that garden –when Harry hit Riley, somewhere she wouldn’t see the bruise.

“Don’t you talk back to me,” he snarled and, later, Riley would never be able to recall if he ever had.

It didn’t take him long to understand: Harry needed something to hit, and if it not Riley, it’d be someone else.

There wasn’t anyone else: just Riley and—

(It never even occurred to him that he could tell her. Harry would make her laugh, after all. When she understood he wasn’t good years later, Riley knew it had hurt her, and so a part of him was even _sad_ to see Harry go.)

“You’re a right piece of work,” Harry told him when Riley was ten.

“You’re a right piece of work,” Riley laughs at himself now, wiping dust off a mirror and wishing he had the strength to shatter it to pieces.

*

He’ll never get a chance to explain, and it’d be a cruel thing besides, but if he could, he’d tell Noah this:

It’s not your fault. It’s just that I was hoping for someone without hands.

*

So Harry would look for him, and he’d catch him, and he’d pin him to flat surfaces, and he’d draw his fist back, and Riley would be trapped like a fly in a spiderweb, trapped like a face in a photograph, something destined to outlast the moment – suspended in the cruellest of ways.

“Aren’t we good at keeping this from her?” Harry whispered in his ear once.

 _Better_ , Riley thought. _We need to be better._

He taught himself how not to cry first. He re-taught himself smiling second.

*

He writes his own letters. He writes, _hello_ , writes, _how are you_ , writes, _fuck you_ , writes, _well, maybe I’d write sweet things about you too if you’d just let me know them first!_

He never gets a reply even though he leaves the letters all over the place.

*

It’s a storm, and it’s raging, and it’s so loud that Riley almost misses the knocking.

(He _would_ miss the knocking, only he’s been waiting, even though he wasn’t _hoping_ —)

He glances at the heavy frying pan on the stove and decides to leave it be.

“No electricity?” Noah guesses once Riley has swung the door open. It’s raining, and he’s dripping water, and it’s almost high tide, but his eyes are still the wettest thing Riley has ever seen.

“Why are you here?” Riley says, more curious than— than.

 _I think I wouldn’t be any good at designing tall buildings_ , Noah told him once. _I’ve been thinking about it a lot: Tour Montparnasse, The Chrysler Building, Ryugyong Hotel. The freaking Tower of Babel. I just don’t understand how people are ever satisfied enough with the lower floors to start in on the ones above, you know? By the ground: that’s where there’s warmth, and safety, and all the good things. Imagine a world full of buildings with nothing but good things inside. Imagine being—_

“I wanted to make sure you were, um,” Noah says, pushing curls off his forehead. “Well, safe.”

“Aren’t you scared of storms?” Riley says, wondering why he’s not letting Noah in. He thinks it must be because if he does, later, he’ll have to let him out.

“Yes, they’re scary,” Noah says, wringing his sleeve even though he’s still out in the rain. “You’re scared of them, too, though, and I wouldn’t want a bolt of lightning to hit you.”

“I thought you wouldn’t want a bolt of lightning to hit _you_.”

“Of course,” Noah says, face softening, and it’s cheating, the universe is cheating, because Riley thought Noah’s face couldn’t _get_ any softer. “That’s secondary, though.”

 _‘That?_ , _’_ Riley thinks hopelessly. _Are_ you _‘that’?_

 _You have to let people in sometimes, dear_ , his grandmother told him once, but when Riley was eleven, he learned about locks, and about pushing chairs under door handles, and about all the hiding places the world had left big enough to fit him.

“A towel,” he says, stupidly. “You’ll need a towel.”

He moves aside and watches as Noah reluctantly steps inside. He watches as he wipes his face with his sleeve – too soaked to make a difference. He watches as he leaves puddles all over the place, and thinks about how they’ll dry soon.

 _Secondary_ , he thinks angrily. _Secondary!?_

There’s never been any selfishness on Noah, and it’s uncanny, like if someone was missing a nose or a collarbone. Uncanny, and almost repulsive – this lack of something that ought to be there.

“Have you been eating?” Noah says, staring at the kitchen sink, empty of dishes.

“I can feed myself, thank you very much,” Riley snaps. “I was doing just fine before—”

“Before what?” Noah asks, curious.

“Why would you want to design _bridges_ anyway?!” Riley explodes. “ _No one_ wants to build those! People _jump_ off those!”

“Safety railings,” Noah says, scratching his nape. “For me what defines a good bridge is this: do people ever _fall_ off it?”

Riley stares at him and his hands shake, and so do Noah’s, and they’re both shaking, and Riley wants to find him a towel, three towels, ten, and no one warned him— no one’s ever told him—

“Aren’t you cold?” he says, and he hates the way he sounds: like he blames Noah for something. Maybe it’s because he does, maybe it’s because somewhere inside himself he’s thinking, _how dare you be someone who gets cold? How dare you be someone who gets cold_ , because it’s easier than waging wars on the weather itself.

Noah shrugs. “I’ve been colder.”

Riley doesn’t know how to keep him warm without making it seem like kindness. Perhaps he could set the house on fire.

He ends up relenting and tossing towels and blankets at Noah. Before Noah can try and guess what it means – that it means something in the first place – he says:

“I’m sorry for what I said. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”

Before Noah can start wondering how he did mean it, he says:

“It wasn’t even about you.”

Before Noah can think not to believe him, he says:

“It’s only that I wanted it to be just me and the ghost.”

He hears himself say it. He remembers how, once, he lost a hair he’d torn from his mother’s arm before he could think a wish, and he hears himself say it, and it feels just the same: a missed chance.

“Just me and the ghost,” he repeats, like tossing earth onto a casket.

“The ghost?” Noah says, and Riley looks at him, _really_ looks at him. He thinks, _you have hands, and I can’t stand it_. He thinks, _your eyes are wet, and screw you_. He thinks, _you have a voice like when ice thaws, and go to hell._

He thinks, _I don’t trust you when you come here and gently turn things over in your hands and watch everything with wonder, because you keep tripping anyway, and that’s how it always ends: people enter a house, and it’s ruin, and it’s rubble, and it’s Picasso._

“I’m not crazy,” he swears. “They play the piano, sort of, just a few notes every now and then. They like peanut butter and honey. They – pears.”

_They’re dust motes, and they’re the floors creaking, and they’re the pipes singing._

Noah stares at him, concerned. Riley smiles.

“Would you like to listen to it?”

“Why are you making that face?” Noah says. He sounds – terrified.

“What face?”

“You look the way I look when I think about you.”

Riley doesn’t ask him what he means. He’s not cruel: he steps over the rubble that’s not there, and leads Noah deep into the house, trying not to look any particular way.

Noah follows, fingers skirting the walls, palms pressed to wood, and Riley almost snaps at him: _stop acting like you’re never coming back here._

Almost, because if Riley will have it his way, Noah _won’t_ be coming back.

“The pear,” he says, raising his candle and pointing to Aunt Thelma’s portrait. She looks like she hates him just then. “Sometimes eaten, sometimes not.”

Noah, damn him, is too kind to ever suggest that it might be just a trick of light.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Riley says, defensive.

“I’m trying to think of a bridge you’d like, actually,” Noah whispers. It’s like he’d break if he spoke up. It’s like he’d fall apart.

“They’re here, somewhere,” Riley insists. “I know it.”

“You keep saying ‘they’” Noah observes with a sad smile. “How come?”

“Well, I haven’t seen them. They could be— I don’t know.”

“It’s just that I figured you’d want this ghost to be a particular way.”

“Oh?”

“Because when you talk about… them, you look the way I look when I— Listen, can I use your shower?”

“You’ll need dry clothes,” Riley says and thinks of how his own will be too small for Noah and how he’d drown in Riley’s grandmother’s old things.

 _See?_ , he wants to say, like a reprimand. _You don’t belong here!_

Later, Riley never hears water running. He thinks that Noah must be sitting locked in that bathroom and breathing and breathing and breathing, only he can’t quite imagine it: Noah seems too selfless even for something as simple as gulping air.

Riley drinks wine straight out of the bottle, one swallow, two, three, for courage, and waits. Something rises in his throat when Noah appears in the kitchen doorway, because something always rises in his throat when Noah appears anywhere, only this time it never stops rising, and just keeps getting worse and worse.

“It’s not too small,” Riley chokes out, staring at the shirt Noah’s wearing now. _His_ shirt.

“That’s because everything you wear,” Noah says, all sad, “is too big on you.”

Riley shakes his head. Sometimes he can’t help but think that he stopped growing at some point—

— _come here, you little—_

and never started again.

“Anyway, you have to believe me, about the ghost,” Riley says, and it’s like he has something small and dead stuck in his throat, too high up to swallow, too low to hack up. “You have to believe me because I have proof.”

It’s still raining outside, and Riley likes rain. He always has. Rain was Harry too lazy to come over, rain was company when Riley didn’t want any, rain was like someone whispering in his ear but without the feel of lips touching his skin.

The ghost, he thinks, likes rain too.

“Proof?” Noah says, patient. Riley stares at that white scar that cuts his eyebrow in two, and wonders if he got it when that kid bigger than him shoved his head underwater and kept it there, pressed to rocks.

 _The thing is,_ Noah said, _you could probably kill someone with a shoe or a hairpin, were you determined enough._ Riley wonders if, all those years, Noah had been telling himself that he’d only killed that kid because he’d hit him with a rock, and not because he’d wanted to. Riley wouldn’t blame him for having wanted to. He wants to kill the kid himself, even though he’s years late.

“Letters,” he says slowly and remembers how, once, when he was twelve, he started stabbing his hand with a pencil to distract himself from thinking about the bruises slowly going yellow under his shirt. “The ghost left me letters in my grandmother’s books.”

Noah’s pupils widen, and he goes pale.

“You found those?” he says, voice— _something_. A strangled thing. “You weren’t supposed to find those!”

“Excuse me?”

Noah stares at him, mouth tilted open, and Riley thinks that he’s doing that thing where he’s breathing too fast to make up for how he’s not breathing at all.

“Christ, Riley— _I_ left those.”

He’s shaking now, and he was shaking before, but this is different: this is like he’s dying, this is like a sickness, this is like if Riley had a blanket in his hands now, he wouldn’t think twice before pulling it over Noah’s shoulders, except he would, because _what is he saying_? _What is he saying_?

“What do you mean, you left them?”

“I mean that I _wrote_ them,” Noah says helplessly.

Riley’s mother called this morning, and he picked up but didn’t say a word, not even when she cried at her end.

 _I don’t remember how to cry_ , he thought but didn’t say. _I unlearned crying so Harry wouldn’t hear me when we were playing hide-and-seek like you told us to._

“But those letters… it said that” _you adored me_ “my grandmother…”

Noah stares at him, and if Riley had a plate in his hands now, he’d drop it, he’d throw it, he’d do _something_.

He knows all the locks in the house by heart, and so he runs.

*

Riley was thirteen, and he was being strong, and when his mother put her hand on his shoulder, right where Harry had squeezed and squeezed and squeezed before, he only hissed a little, like air escaping a punctured tire.

“Everything alright?” she asked, tightening her grip slightly. It was supposed to be reassuring, and Riley made sure to look reassured.

 _Why don’t you see it?_ he thought at her, furious with it. _Why are you letting me pretend well enough to fool you?_

Years later, he’d go away to university, free of that house where Harry was no more, aching for her like she was a bone he needed for walking.

Years later, at his grandmother’s funeral, he would cry for the first time in forever and it would occur to him that they formed a triangle: his mother’s house, his grandmother’s house, and this grave they’d just put her in.

Years later, he would turn the key in the lock of his grandmother’s house, swollen with some kind of a presence like a sponge, and he’d think of the shape as a circle instead: something without sharp edges, a carousel. 

*

Riley is sitting on the bathroom tiles, back to the door, and Noah is on the other side.

Earlier, he asked, _do you want me to go_ , and Riley thought, _don’t, oh, don’t!_ but didn’t say a thing. Noah stayed but Riley can almost smell the reluctance and wishes it was the other way around: a door still separating them but Noah on the inside because, with Riley, there’s never any danger that he’ll leave.

“It happened like this,” Noah says, and Riley stares at the shower curtain, white with pink flamingos all over it. When he first moved in, his grandmother’s hair was still caught in the drain, silver like something stolen from the moon. 

“This big kid had his hand on the back of my neck, and he was pressing down, and I couldn’t breathe, and I was choking on water, and the water, it was _everywhere_ , and I felt pebbles scraping my face, and I thought that I would never get to design a bridge, and I grabbed for something, _any_ thing, but there were only rocks.”

Riley rasps his knuckles against the door when Noah goes quiet, to signal that he’s listening.

“She saw us,” Noah says softly. “Your grandmother saw us, and later, they believed her when she said that it had been self-defense.”

Riley closes his eyes, the story pulling him like a tide, and the tap quiet for once.

“After that, water was— scary. It took me weeks to work up the nerve and walk up to her door. It was low tide, and it would stay so for hours, but I put on those inflatable shoulder pads on before heading across anyway. It’s stupid, I know. I could swim, but… Well. It took her a while to open the door. By the time she did, I was sitting on her doorstep and counting birds, convinced no one was home. She smiled and recognised me right away. She said, _those scabs, why, they give you character, young man_. She asked me if I knew how to play chess, and I told her that I knew how to play checkers and how to draw a house. She offered to teach me, and she made me tea, and she welcomed me like it’d never occurred to her to think me an intruder. After that, I would visit twice a month or so. I— I didn’t want to _impose_ , even though she’d never made me feel like I would be. She would tell me about building airplanes, even though she’d never built one, and she’d tell me about the decade she’d spent working as a hairdresser, and how, once, someone told her that they wanted a hairstyle shaped like a pavlova. She’d tell me about her dance tournaments, and she’d sing Abba songs, and she taught me— she taught me how to _cook_. Years passed before she said, _you won’t believe this, Noah. You won’t believe this, but I finally met my grandson_ , _and he’s simply the best thing in the world_.”

Riley drags his knees up to his chest and thinks that he’d probably like this story if he didn’t know the ending.

“The way she’d talk about you, Riley. You sounded like a walking miracle. Don’t make that face. I _know_ you’re making a face. I loved all her stories, but you were my favourite. She would tell me about how you’d get in shouting matches with the wind, and how you’d always fight for the last mangoes with women twice your age in the supermarket, and how you’d crouch in front of dogs with their leashes tied to lampposts and tell them jokes.”

“And then she died,” Riley croaks.

“And then she died,” Noah echoes sadly. “I went to the funeral.”

“You did?”

“I was in the back of the church,” Noah says. “You couldn’t have seen me.”

“But you saw _me_?”

“You were crying, and that’s why I want to design bridges.”

“What do you mean?”

“Somewhere over the rainbow, and all that. It’s how you can get from a sad place to somewhere that’s at least a little bit better even though it seems impossible,” Noah explains. “You look nice in black, but I didn’t like it – not the shirt, not the blazer. You looked too pale in it, like a— well.”

“Like a ghost,” Riley says, wry.

“The church smelled like old roses and like wax,” Noah continues. “I thought to myself, _God, but she’d hate this_ , and later, when you walked past me with your mother, I heard you say, _God, but she’d hate this_.”

“Oh.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Noah agrees. “I met your mum, too.”

“At the funeral?”

“At the cemetery. I go there sometimes and, apparently, so does she.”

Riley can’t help but smile – despite everything, maybe because of it.

“How did it go?”

“I told her that Loretta had been my only friend and that I missed her. She told me that Loretta had been her only mother and that she was trying _not_ to miss her, but no luck. She said that she’s a chronic miss-er, and misses people even when they’re there. She said that she had a son who’s the same and that he was probably busy missing the whole world just then and telling himself otherwise. She said her name was Anita, and would I like to say a prayer with her?”

“I haven’t been to the grave in a while,” Riley confesses.

“You haven’t been anywhere in a while,” Noah points out, amused.

“What did you think, then? When you saw me at the funeral?” Riley says, trying and failing to keep bitterness out of his voice. “Were you _disappointed_?”

“Disappointed?” Noah says, all confusion. “About what?”

“Never mind,” Riley mumbles, hugging his knees to his chest.

“The first thing I thought was, _finally_ ,” Noah admits. “The second thing I thought was, _wow, this kid looks like he’s never tried Loretta’s stew in his life_.”

Riley turns his head and presses his forehead to the wood of the door, where the white paint is peeling. He wonders what’s on the other side: the back of Noah’s neck? His ear? His hair? He remembers that day Noah stayed over and how, as he slept on the couch, Riley stood over him and stared at the few moles climbing up his neck like the beginning of a connect the dots. He remembers wanting to connect them.

“You must have been glad when I got sick, then,” he says, and almost manages a laugh.

“Oh, I would have cooked for you sooner or later, anyway,” Noah assures him. “But I _was_ glad for the excuse.”

 _Excuses_ , Riley thinks bitterly. _Oh, how I know something about those._

“You said you wanted to see the house,” Riley says, accusing.

“I did want to see the house. I’d missed it. I thought it would smell like her.”

“But?” Riley prompts, because he hears it there, like the sentence is a cliff to jump off.

“I wanted to see you _more_.”

He remembers wanting to connect the dots, and he remembers praying for the ghost to be real so that this thing that was happening to him wouldn’t have to be.

“You didn’t really know me,” Riley says, feeling small and wanting to be smaller still, shoe-sized, something that could never run out of hiding places. “I was just some story she told you.”

“ _’Just some story_ ,’” Noah snorts. “I say if someone thinks stories are just stories, it means they’ve never heard a good one.”

“So what were you doing, then?” Riley says quietly. “What have you been doing this whole time?”

He hears Noah shift on the other side, and bless this door, but God _damn_ this door.

“It’s not that complicated. I would draw the furniture. I would annoy you. I would draw you when you weren’t looking, but only sometimes. I was trying to get you to like me, but not the way you think. Playing chess – something like that is enough for me. It’s _important_ to me. I was trying to get you to like me.”

“ _I_ was trying to make you hate me.”

Noah laughs.

“I could never hate you.”

Riley surprises himself.

“I liked you from the start.”

He buries his head in his arms and tries to breathe. He wonders if Noah can tell. He wonders if he’s doing the same thing.

“Did you?” he says, uncertain.

“You’re likeable!” Riley protests angrily. He hates the thought of Noah thinking otherwise.

“Am I?”

“ _Jesus_.”

He tries not to think about the letters, but his head is all _and I wished (oh, how I wished) that you were someone I too could meet on a bus_ and _you deserve things, too_ and _I decided I’d try to believe in God if I ever met you_ and _whenever I close my eyes now, you’re there on the inside of my eyelids._

“Why would you leave them here?” Riley tries. “The letters?”

“I thought you’d never find them,” Noah says simply. “I thought you’d never find them, but I liked the thought that, one day, you might.”

“Why write them in the first place?”

“What do you think?” Noah says, fond, and Riley is not strong enough for this. He’s _not_. He hasn’t been for the longest time.

His mother and Harry would argue sometimes, loud arguments, more screams than rhetorics, and sometimes Riley would flinch, expecting Harry to hit her, but he never did. Maybe he saw something in her: how she wasn’t what he wanted, how, just maybe, she wouldn’t stand there and take it. How, just maybe, she would hit back. It wasn’t raining the first time Harry looked at Riley like it’d just occurred to him, _but this one won’t_ , and later, Riley didn’t, because he thought, _better me than her._ Because he thought, _neither of us can know what she’d do._

The way Riley sees it, if you keep your door open, you have no business complaining about what comes in.

 _Love_ , his grandmother laughed once, _is a haunting._

Noah says, “she would never let the piano get dusty, like she was waiting for someone to come and play it.”

Noah says, “she said, let’s spend Christmas together, and I promised her a tree, and I promised her colourful baubles, and she died, but _I promised her_.”

Noah says, “she’d never let me win in chess, can you believe?”

Riley says, “There’s this Polish novella she kept talking about.”

Noah rasps his knuckles on the door, to signal that he’s listening. Riley takes a deep breath and goes on breaking both their hearts.

“It’s called _Latarnik_ – apparently, that’s Polish for lighthouse keeper – and it’s about this man who’s, yeah, you’ve guessed it, a lighthouse keeper. He’s a political refugee, and he misses his homeland. He spent long years wandering before landing the lighthouse keeper job, you see. One day, he receives a package full of books, and one of them is this important Polish epic poem, and he reads it and starts reminiscing. He falls asleep and dreams about the book, and in the morning, he’s notified that because of his negligence, a ship hit rocks and sank. See, he'd forgotten all about the lighthouse. He’s fired, and he has no choice but to wander again, only now he has this piece of his homeland with him, or whatever, so it’s not all bad.”

“That’s… interesting,” Noah says, clearly puzzled.

“No, it’s not,” Riley snorts. “It’s fucking boring, but see, I figure, for some people it’s different. Some people don’t forget the world dreaming about better times. Some people forget the world dreaming about _worse_ times, and ships wreck all the same, only there’s no hopeful ending, no last page to make it all meaningful.”

For a moment, Noah is so quiet that Riley starts wondering if he’s even really there. If he _ever_ was.

“What are you saying?” Noah says finally, voice breaking. “That you’re the lighthouse keeper, and I’m, what, the _ship_?”

“I’m telling you how it is,” Riley says, but what he really means is _yes_. What he really means is, _I’m telling you how it’ll be. I’m telling you your future without having to read your palm. I’m changing it as we speak so that you never sink._

(Now Riley knows that Noah's skin must be warm, it's awfully hard, keeping himself from imagning how it'd feel against his.)  


“I can’t believe you!” Noah says, incredulous. “Do you really think—”

“The ghost,” Riley interrupts him. “It’s just me and the ghost—”

“ _There’s no ghost_ —”

“—And I think it’s time you left.”

For a moment, the silence is the most deafening thing Riley’s ever heard. Then Noah shifts, gets up, walks away. Stops, keeps walking. Opens the front door, hesitates, shuts it. Opens it again, shuts it, and this time it’s for real. This time, he’s on the right ( _wrong_ ) side of that door. This time it’s for always.

Riley slowly crawls across the tiles to inspect the shower drain.

Just one silver hair, he thinks desperately.

Just one brown hair, he thinks hopelessly, even though he knows Noah never took that shower. 

Oh, the things he keeps doing to himself.

*

“If you were an architect,” he never dared ask Noah, “would you design me a house?”

_If you were an architect, would you design me a house that would have windows and doors and doorknobs and be safe anyway?_

*

After, he doesn’t get to keep deluding himself for much longer. The world is not kind enough to let him have that.

One day, he hears a clattering noise, and runs downstairs only to find a cat in the kitchen, paw smeared with peanut butter and the jar rolling on the table.

He remembers, with dawning understanding, how he used to keep the windows open all the time, and how, once he stopped, the ghost went quiet for days.

He looks around, searching for something to throw at the cat – a shoe, a book, a mug – but in the end, he’s too exhausted for anger. He wonders if his grandmother used to feed the cat, and hates himself for how, now that he’s driven Noah away, he has no one to ask.

For the first time since his grandmother’s funeral, he cries.

*

“The pear keeps changing,” he tells his mother on the phone, “but I think it’s just light.”

“I wish you’d visit,” she sighs. “I wish you’d let _me_ visit.”

Riley doesn’t want to visit her: he wants to stay in this house forever and see which one of them rots first.

“I’m doing okay,” he says, and he’s gotten so very good at this – his voice doesn’t shake, even though his whole body is.

“There’s this boy who keeps visiting your grandmother’s grave,” his mother tells him. “I saw him just yesterday, and he looked _so sad_.”

*

Riley was eleven when he made a clay aeroplane for his mother.

“Do you think she’ll like it?” he asked Harry, because his mother had said: _I don’t know why you dislike him so much, but you have to give him a chance._ “I know that it’s a little clumsy, but I think it’ll be alright if I paint it.”

Harry scowled at the thing.

“But does it fly?” he asked, arching an eyebrow.

“Sure,” Riley said. “It’s an aeroplane.”

“Mmm,” Harry hummed with a grin. “Let’s see, then.”

Before Riley knew what was happening, Harry took the aeroplane from him and flung it at the wall. Riley watched it shutter to pieces, and thought, _but I spent hours making it, and it was drying for so long._

“Seems like you’ll have to do better, kid,” Harry said, amused. “And clean that up before your mother sees.”

Riley stared at him, horrified, and thought, _who are you? where did you come from? why did you come?_ He stared at him, horrified, and thought, _is it always like this? do they always come, tracking dirt, only to smash everything to pieces?_ He stared at him, horrified, and thought, _if this is what the world is like, why does anyone ever bother making anything? if this is what the world is like, why do people ever leave their door unlocked?_

*

Riley keeps staring at those ceilings Noah would spend so much time drawing, spread on the floor, and admits it to himself: how cruel he’s been to love.

_Love._

You set traps for love, and you want it to get caught in one, die, _stink_. You’re too impatient to set traps for love, too scared that before you’re done, you’ll decide to let it live after all, so you kick it instead. You take a baseball bat to it, you take a _frying pan_ to it, and you beat it to death, and you beat it to a pulp, and you keep hitting, because how dare it come to you uninvited?

 _You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself_ , and Riley can’t help but laugh. He thought that love was something one could create alone and tend to without ever having to invite any strangers in, and he thought it enough that he even thought himself a ghost to love.

How pathetic.

“Now what?” he asks the person who’s never been there. “Now fucking what?”

He places a stool on a chair and puts Noah’s letters on the top of one of the kitchen cupboards so he won’t be tempted to reread them, but not an hour has passed when he’s back and almost kills himself struggling to reach them.

*

Riley was thirteen when he made a Valentine's card for the girl he liked. He had three bruises over his ribs, but it was okay because no one could see under his shirt. The valentine card was blue, not red, because he’d heard the girl say blue was her favourite colour once. He glued paper daisies all over the thing, because on the Internet it said that daisies meant innocence, and he wanted to think that the world still had it, bruises or not, messed-up wrist or not. Inside the card, it said, _I don’t want you to know who I am. I only want you to know that I am, and that you’re spectacular._ He misspelled ‘spectacular,’ one _c_ a _k_ , but he only noticed when he took the card out of the trash after classes, hours after he’d slipped it into the girl’s bag, cranberry juice spilled all over it.

It wasn’t a big thing. It was a _small_ thing. More small things would come. They would never stop coming.

 _This will never end_ , he thought to himself one day, _unless I end it._

He’s twenty now, and he’s barricaded himself in his grandmother’s house, but he was so much younger when he barricaded himself inside himself.

*

When he changes his mind, it’s not a big thing. It’s not some epiphany. It’s not his mother telling him ‘I always knew’ on the phone because she never did and so she’ll never tell him that. It’s not the groaning pipes and it’s not the dripping taps, not at all like messages in Morse code. It’s not Theodora’s letters still smelling of perfume, and it’s not Noah’s letters smelling like sadness itself.

More than anything, it’s the weariness.

 _This will never end_ , Riley thinks to himself one day, _unless I end it._

He dresses the pine tree that Noah brought here, and he handles the baubles so carefully that they never break. He marvels at how he didn’t have to do anything to earn this person who keeps making beautiful things and putting them in the hands of people who don’t deserve them. He thinks of how Noah and his grandmother were planning to spend Christmas together, and it ruins him a little, how Noah must not have anyone else, not a ship after all, but already driftwood.

It’s weariness, yes, but it’s anger, too. Riley thinks of Noah, and he’s angry. He’s _furious_. He remembers how Noah would just let Riley be cruel to him, and thinks, _how could you?_ He remembers, and he thinks, _how dare you?_

Lighthouses, rocks, ships – as if someone like Noah could ever survive the world just because Riley forced him into surviving _him_. No selfishness on him, and it might be uncanny, and it might be repulsive, but it’s _his_.

He writes Noah letters – _more_ letters – and it kills him that he can’t post them.

He keeps writing them anyway because he gets it now, he really does.

He writes, _and what were you thinking, coming back again and again even though I was so terrible?_ He writes, _what is wrong with you, you idiot?_ He writes, _you wait. You just wait. Come back here one more time, and I’m going to be so kind to you that you won’t even know what hit you._

But Noah never comes – not when Riley orders cat food and starts feeding the stray, not when he starts dusting the piano that he knows he’ll never neglect again, and not when he makes enough stew for two, almost burning the house down in the process.

*

He sleeps, and he wakes, and he sleeps, and his grandmother says: _has there ever been a more chilling sentence than ‘silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone’?_

In the morning, he tugs on the hair on his arm, but it’s too short. He tries an eyelash, and, once he has it on the very tip of his finger, he makes a wish.

*

“I wish you’d visit,” his mother says on the phone. “Andrew would love that, too.”

“Maybe,” Riley says, and he thinks he’s even starting to mean it. After all, it’s time he told his mother that he doesn’t want her to sell the house and that she’ll never guess why.

*

When the idea occurs to him, it’s a few hours till low tide. He waits, and wrings his fingers, and starts washing the floors, and stares at the ceiling, and counts to ten, and counts to a hundred, and counts all the windows in the house, and when he can’t wait any longer, he takes a deep breath and grabs his keys. He takes a blanket, too, because he’s seen the jackets Noah wears, and _Jesus Christ_ – if Riley has any say in it – and he hopes he will, after today – Noah will never be cold again.

He locks up the house and glances up at the sky that looks like a dirty rag, too soaked to ever wring dry. He braces himself before stepping into the water and wading through it towards the shore. When it’s up to his waist, he keeps the blanket over his head and ignores how his teeth are already chattering. He’ll probably catch his death like this, but it’s alright, because maybe then Noah will make him that leek soup again.

By the time Riley gets to town, it’s late, and he’s freezing, and he thinks that if he’s in front of the wrong Sainsbury, he’ll cry. He knows that Noah works Saturdays, but he’s scared that today is different, and he doesn’t dare walk in. He cradles the blanket, and he shudders, and he’s all openings now: if someone wanted to, they could make him bleed out right here on the sidewalk. He has clothes on, but it feels like he doesn’t, and he has no choice but to bear it now. He _has_ chosen it now.

Hours pass and the sky is like nothing, but the world – hello world – has things in it. The door slides open, and a woman in purple boots walks out, the door slides open, and a man with a briefcase in his hand walks out, the door slides open and oh, there he is. Zucchini eyes, and a mouth that will stretch in that orange-peel smile any moment now, and _there he is._

**Author's Note:**

> And yet again, I wrote a story only to realise that no one kisses in it after the fact :,) Thank you for reading if anyone has <3
> 
> (Yes, I do realise that Sainsbury's is, like, the least romantic location ever. Lidl would have been better but alas!)
> 
> PLEASE DON'T EVER GIVE PEANUT BUTTER OR HONEY TO CATS, I DON'T THINK IT'S GOOD FOR THEM!


End file.
